HIST 164 A - The Automobile

Campus: Urbana-Champaign

Description:

Interdisciplinary examination of the automobile industry, its production systems, its marketing strategies, and the way automobiles reflect the changing landscapes of consumer tastes and value over time.

Special Instructions:

Description: This course is an interdisciplinary examination of the global automobile industry, its production systems, its marketing strategies, and the way automobiles reflect the changing landscapes of consumer tastes and values over time. We will look at how, in a relatively short period of time, automobiles brought radical changes to mobility, urban landscapes, culture, environments, labor, and social relations to people in nearly every corner of the world - with those changes distributed unevenly and often manifesting in very different ways. Both the centrality of the automobile in rapid social change and the uneven distribution of the changes it brought make it an ideal tool through which we will explore the intersections of this ubiquitous object with issues of gender, race, class, and empire in various historical and geographical contexts.

Option 1

Course Level: Undergraduate

Credit: 3

Term(s): Summer