One for the road: Mobility in American life, 1787-1985

One for the Road: Mobility in American Life, 1787--1985 is a foundational inquiry into how individual physical movement and individual social and economic inequality together have organized a wide array of material experience and cultural meaning in American life. The study tells about the genesis and trajectory of the metaphor of "mobility," describes some of the ways it was harnessed and by whom, and to what purposes over a wide span of history. In so doing, it demonstrates how movement has brokered the mutual shaping of a variety of economic, social, and material matters. In particular, One for the Road investigates how historical intersections among individual economic and social inequality and physical movement bear in important ways on the construction and interpretation of moral matters. The study is an extended portrayal of these relationships, and so demonstrates something of how American society has taken shape.;Chapter 1 locates the origins of the metaphor of mobility in seventeenth century physics, and traces its intellectual history since the Enlightenment. The next four chapters tell about the chronological and overlapping developments in America's four most popular technologies of individual movement: shoes, horse, human-propelled vehicles (bicycles), and self-propelled vehicles (automobiles), respectively. The chapters provide a materialist overview of who had access to the form of technology, and what those persons used the technology for. They tell how various persons interpreted movement via each technology, and how those interpretations embraced moral matters that did not necessarily have anything to do with movement per se. Each of these chapters ends by interpreting the genesis and longevity of an American icon that both illustrates social and economic mobility through the invocation of physical movement, and straddles the moral dilemmas that movement raises. The final chapter focuses on one moral issue---drinking---and through three case studies traces its material intersections with physical movement. The effort is to demonstrate that material relationships influence the construction of moral problems.