Over its first fifty years SHOT has regularly reached out to a wide audience and sought to engage public concerns. In this essay, Colin Divall uses the history of transport and mobility to explore how that engagement might be reinvigorated, arguing that it will mean re-examining of some of the field’s fundamental professional assumptions and the recognition of a different kind of historiography.

The Michigan Central Station is a singular ruin in a city that epitomizes decline. It is ironic that in the Motor City the most eloquent symbol of the ebbing of a technological system, and the culture in which it thrived, has far less to do with cars than with what cars displaced.

It is the rare scholar of American transportation history who has not used George Rogers Taylor’s The Transportation Revolution as the launchpad for his or her own research, and it remains a classic work of technological history.