From Hobby to Heritage: Protecting our Overlooked Automotive Heritage in the Twenty-first Century

For much of the twentieth century heritage preservation has primarily focused on sedentary objects (i.e., 1906 Antiquities Act in the United States, 1919 Historic Sites and Monuments Board in Canada, etc.). While some countries have studied and documented vehicles for preservation and/or conservation, their official recognition as landmarks or on registers of official distinction has largely been overlooked. The evolution of the automobile also raises questions of how we care about history, if at all. How does an understanding of where we have come from orient us, whether corporate leader, designer, car owner, driver, or passenger, on the possible futures of automobility? The history of the automobile is all about the future because in order to know where we are going we need to understand where we have come from. Preserved vestiges of the past assist for future planning.

Therefore, in order to address these issues (at least on an academic level), we are seeking papers for an edited volume that considers automobiles and associated material culture as part of the heritage preservation milieu. For publication consideration papers should be 6,000 to 7,500 words in length, and use Chicago style endnotes citation, and be MS Word or RTF files. Illustrations are encouraged (we still need to determine number limit, but most likely 6 or less per chapter) and should be submitted as separate files either tiffs or jpegs, at 300 dpi or higher, or eps files for vector-based images. Chapter contributors are responsible for obtaining copyright permissions. The language of the publication will be American-style English. Non-native speakers of English should have their draft papers reviewed by a native speaker. Abstracts/proposal will be reviewed for acceptance on a rolling basis. The deadline for full-length draft papers is January 31, 2017.

Barry L. Stiefel, College of Charleston stiefelb@cofc.edu
Michael Shanks, Stanford University
Mark Gessler, Historic Vehicle Association