Toward Digital Equity: Bridging the Divide in Education Book

A cultural history of not the car nor the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, Republic of Drivers employs poststructuralism (and a hefty truckload of jargon) to historicize "automobility," that is, the heterogeneous sum of all things driving (cars, roads, fuel, signage, the auto industry, traffic law, licensing requirements, etc.) and how they shape and inform what Seiler considers distinctly "American" understandings of the self.

Seiler focuses his study on two historical time periods when American ideas of individualism, modernity, and freedom were significantly challenged. First, 1895-1920, when the proprietary capitalism of autonomous farmers and craftsman was replaced by the corporate capitalism of the disempowered and Taylorized factory worker, whose only solace lay in the newfound consumer culture. Second, the 1950s, when cold war anxieties threatened American ideas of freedom, individualism, and masculinized strength. In both time periods, automobility provided a means for locating the free and modern self, while at the same time, extending and naturalizing the power and control of governing bodies.

In his second chapter, where he addresses women, femininity, and driving, and his fourth chapter, in which he addresses African American mobility, Seiler addresses how the promises embodied within driving (promises that conjured a modern adaptation of Turner's frontier thesis) were largely limited to white men, an arrangement that in and of itself also threatened "Freedom."