Dissertation Research: Performance Tuning: The Evolution of the American Automotive Speed Equipment Industry, 1925-1985

学院派历史学家把美国汽车的历史看作是一个大企业、大规模生产和大规模营销的故事。许多学者还试图强调一些其他关键的主题和问题，这些主题和问题是在仔细考虑这段历史时出现的，包括州际公路的建设，郊区的发展，以及大规模汽车出行和环境退化之间的关系。然而，关于汽车用户在创造这一历史中的作用，还有很多工作要做。这项STS论文改进补助金支持论文的实地工作，重点关注汽车用户的特定子集，这些用户在标准历史中缺席，难以解释：热车迷，那些寻求修改其标准生产汽车以提高性能的人。美国国家科学基金会的资金将支持一系列前往加利福尼亚、佛罗里达和华盛顿特区的档案收藏之旅。这些档案研究短途旅行将有助于充实论文的主体，为首席研究员提供有关高速设备制造的证据，行业先驱的背景和培训，以及高性能行业与政府监管机构之间的关系，否则将无法获得。此外，资金将支持在加州与幸存的速度设备行业先驱进行口头访谈，访谈将为首席研究员提供第一手的见解，否则将是不可知的。这篇论文将从四个方面阐明美国汽车的历史。这将突显出，在三巨头的阴影下，以灵活为导向、消费者驱动的汽车行业能够生存下来。它将强调技术热情在汽车发展过程中挥之不去的重要性。它将利用高速设备行业的经验，重新审视和修正我们对三巨头在上世纪六七十年代与政府监管机构打交道时所犯错误的理解。最后，它将挑战一个长期存在的观念，即到20世纪20年代，汽车已经成为一个“黑盒子”，记录社会建构主义者的“最终用户解释灵活性”在整个汽车历史中仍然相当强大的程度。

Academic historians have treated the history of the automobile in America as a story of big business, mass production, and mass marketing. A number of scholars have also sought to highlight some of the other critical themes and issues which emerge from a careful consideration of this history, including the construction of the Interstate Highways, the growth of suburbia, and the relationship between mass automobility and environmental degradation. Nevertheless, much work remains to be done on the role of the automobile user in the making of this history. This STS dissertation improvement grant supports field work for a dissertation which focuses on the pursuits of a particular subset of automobile users whose absence from the standard histories defies easy explanation: hot rodders, those who seek to modify their standard production automobiles for improved performance. NSF funding will support a series of trips to archival collections in California, Florida, and Washington, DC. These archival research excursions will help to flesh out the body of the dissertation by providing the principal investigator with evidence regarding the manufacture of speed equipment, the background and training of the industry's pioneers, and the relationship between the high-performance industry and governmental regulators which would otherwise be unavailable. In addition, funding will support oral interviews in California with the surviving pioneers of the speed equipment industry, interviews that will provide the principal investigator with first-hand insights which would otherwise be unknowable. This dissertation will shed new light on the history of the automobile in America in four ways. It will highlight the survival of a flexibly oriented, consumer-driven automotive industry in the shadow of the Big Three. It will emphasize the lingering importance of technological enthusiasm in the evolution of automobility. It will use the experience of the speed equipment industry to reexamine and revise our understanding of the mistakes made by the Big Three in its dealings with governmental regulators in the 1960s and 1970s. And, finally, it will challenge the longstanding notion that the automobile had become a "black box" by the 1920s, documenting the extent to which the social constructivists "end-user interpretive flexibility" has instead remained quite strong throughout the history of the automobile.