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Please join us next Monday, November 28th, for the STS colloquium:
<br><br>
<div align="center"><font size=5 color="#0000FF"><b>Setting the Scene for
Scenic Roads: <br>
Parkways in the United States and Germany, 1930-1970<br><br>
</font><font size=5>Thomas Zeller<br>
</font><font size=4>University of Maryland, College Park<br>
4:00 p.m., E51-095<br><br>
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This talk will explore the way roads have been redesigned for the
automobile as parkways in the United States and Germany, what meanings
they acquired, and how drivers and passengers experienced them. These
roads constituted nature, prescribed a way of seeing it, and turned the
scenic view into a visual commodity that could be consumed akin to other
mass-produced artifacts. However, this was a contested process, in which
civil engineers, landscape architects and the consumers of these roads
and views-car drivers and passsengers-competed with each other over
questions of expertise, meaning, and proper usage. The most prominent
specimens of these roads were the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States
and the Deutsche Alpenstrasse in Germany.<br><br>
Thomas Zeller is an assistant professor in the Department of History at
the University of Maryland, where he holds a joint appointment with the
A. James Clark School of Engineering. His research is located on the
intersections of environmental history and the history of technology. He
is the author of <i>Strasse, Bahn, Panorama</i> (Campus, 2002), a revised
version of which is forthcoming as <i>Driving Germany: The Landscape of
the Autobahn, 1930-1965</i>_with Berghahn Books in 2007. Zeller has
coedited the volumes <i>Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and
Environmental History</i> (Rutgers University Press, 2005) and <i>How
Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third
Reich</i> (Ohio University Press, December 2005). His current book-length
research project, "Consuming Landscapes. The View from the Road in
the United States and Germany, 1910-1990," has been supported by
grants from the National Science Foundation and the Kluge Center at the
Library of Congress.<br><br>
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Debbie Meinbresse<br>
STS Program, MIT<br>
617-452-2390</body>
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