Home » Content Tags » Zeller

Zeller

Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters
8/22/22

What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure.

For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes, Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century.

Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers—landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners—sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty.

Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?

Hearing Echoes of Battle to Get Seat Belts to ‘Click’
4/18/22

By Jessica Weiss ’05

A deadly public scourge. A fight pitting government safety mandates against personal freedom. And over time, growing popular acceptance of a solution that was a shot in the arm for public health.

If this sounds like the COVID-19 vaccine controversy, think again. Beginning in the 1950s, engineers, drivers, passengers, regulators and politicians in the United States entered into highly charged deliberations over whether seat belts and speed limits should become mandatory. Today most of the country has 90% seat belt use, and a University of Maryland historian is digging into the historical controversy with an eye to its present-day echoes.

“It’s hard now to imagine a time when seat belts would be controversial, but there was a vivid, expensive and passionate debate about road safety and the lack thereof,” said Associate Professor Thomas Zeller, a specialist in environmental history and the history of technology.

Zeller was recently named a 2022–23 Arthur Molella Distinguished Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and will start in September on a project to explore this history. He will have access to the National Museum of American History’s artifacts, archival collections and library resources, including physical seat belts and guidebooks on highway safety.

Airplane pilots had already been using seat belts for decades when the push to make them standard in cars began to take hold in the 1950s. By 1955, some 100 people were dying on the roads each day. Despite increasing public health research showing that seat belts saved lives in crashes, many people argued against them, focusing on their potential to cause internal injuries or to make it more difficult to escape a burning or submerged car. Other opponents said that regardless of safety implications, it should be a personal choice instead of a requirement.

In a 1966 speech, former President Lyndon Johnson dubbed the high number of deaths on the nation’s roads “the highway disease.” Laws that began to require seat belts in the 1960s—including a federal law requiring “lap and shoulder belts” in all new cars starting in 1968—were portrayed by some as attacks on personal liberty. Critics of laws that instituted fines for not buckling up in the 1980s likened them to encroaching totalitarianism. At the time, only 14% of Americans used seat belts.

Zeller plans to examine scores of archived letters to the editor commenting on proposed laws and mandates from the 1960s to the 1980s. He’ll also explore the role of several public safety campaigns, such as those featuring famed crash test dummies Vince and Larry. The dummies are part of the National Museum of American History collections, along with seat belts, alcohol detection devices and other objects related to automobile safety.

He said exploring this history will shed light on the present, as Americans are once again divided on how much power the government should have to protect public welfare, even if it means taking away rights.

In recent months, some doctors and public health officials have even compared vaccines to seat belts in their ability to significantly decrease the risk of COVID-19.

“The story of public health is sometimes about doing something for the collective good that requires individuals to change their behavior,” Zeller said. “And that’s the underlying tension.”

TOME@UMD Announces Open Access Publishing Grant Recipients
12/14/21

UMD Libraries is pleased to announce the recipients of the inaugural TOME@UMD grants:

 

 

 

  • Siv B. Lie, Ph.D., of the School of Music and her work, Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France;  
  • Mauro Resmini, Ph.D., of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and his work, Italian Political Cinema; 
  • Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Ph.D., of the Department of Anthropology and her work, Immigration and the Landscape of Care in Rural America;  
  • Thomas Zeller, Ph.D., from the Department of History and his work, Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters.

The TOME@UMD (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) grant program sponsors the publication of open access, digital monographs of UMD faculty members.

Scholarly monographs are detailed written accounts of research in specialized subjects, and are especially critical in the dissemination of knowledge in the arts, humanities, and social sciences disciplines.Publishing open access monographs removes access barriers and allows for research to be used freely by anyone.

All UMD faculty members were invited to apply and submissions were evaluated on the potential impact of their work both in their field and beyond academia; the benefits of the open access distribution for their work; and the potential to enhance equity, diversity and inclusion in the production and dissemination of knowledge.

TOME is a national initiative to advance open-access (OA) publishing of monographs in the humanities and social sciences. TOME’s goal is to make this important scholarship available to readers across the globe, without cost and access barriers. 

TOME@UMD is led by the University Libraries in partnership with the Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost, and the College of Arts and Humanities.

Subscribe to RSS - Zeller