The Journal of Transport History

Research on mobility has shown considerable interest in promoting an interdisciplinary approach to history in order to renew knowledge of transport. Among the issues brought to light by these perspectives, the question of the environment is central. Because transport affects the territories we inhabit, because it reflects the way societies are driven by technology, the mobilisation of history and its long-term perspectives shed light on the footprints it has left on the Earth. By initiating a dialogue between the objects of transport history and the issues of the Anthropocene, the retrospective perspective we propose involves understanding the interdependencies of the scales and boundaries that affect our environments. Reciprocally, adopting this point of view commits us to renewing our understanding of mobile cultures, identifying their hidden faces, exploring their margins and reopening potentialities. This article introduces a new section for the Journal of Transport History, entitled “Mobile cultures and the Anthropocene”.

At a time when the future of the internal combustion engine-powered motorcycle, if not the industry as a whole, seems clouded, it may be appropriate to reflect on the importance of the two-wheeled vehicle as a cultural artefact – that is, its importance in the creation of an identity and a self-image for its owner and rider. This article examines this subject through the examples of three figures for whom the motorcycle was crucial in the construction of their identity and the fame they achieved, in real life and in literary representation – the poet Thom Gunn, the psychologist Oliver Sacks, and the war hero T. E. Lawrence. For all three the motorcycle was a preferred mode of transport. But it was more than that. It was a marker of the identity they chose to create for themselves, something – as each said – that an automobile could never be.

This article examines the history of road planning in the decades following the Second World War on the Navajo Nation. Federal highway planners and Navajo residents had conflicting ideas about the role of roads in the Nation's postwar development. The planners’ support for highways near uranium mines undermined efforts towards Navajo self-development and modernization. Federally planned and subsidized highways granted extractive industries control over large portions of the Nation. Those highways locked in a regime of environmental exploitation that caused severe and debilitating public health consequences for Navajo communities.

In this article, a comparison is provided of the alternative Australian and Canadian government procurement policies for military aircraft in the post-Second World War period. Procurement was used by both governments to maintain manufacturing capacity that was established in the Second World War. By undertaking this analysis, the differing characteristics of the two policies are highlighted. In both cases procurement policies promoted the maintenance of aircraft manufacturing industries, however, the resulting industries were quite different in nature, a result partly of the differing natures of the policies, and different to some degree to the results of the policy in other Western countries.

This article deals with the Nordic Council as a cooperation organ for building transnational roads outside of the E-road network during the period 1956–1966. The Nordic experience of planning and interconnecting transnational roads is related to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) and the development of the E-road network. It is noted that whereas the E-road network built on an ambition within the ECE to create mutual understanding and fraternity between the European nations, the Nordic Council viewed roads as instruments to deal with shared economic and social problems. Another difference is that while the member states of the ECE interacted with societal groups and expert organisations during the interconnection of the E-road network, such actors did not participate directly with the Nordic Council. The inter-Nordic stream of technical expertise was primarily channelled through the national road administrations which cooperated to interconnect the trans-Nordic network.

In 1919 the Paris Peace Conference met to remake the world following the First World War. Among the most serious problems faced was the collapse of the multinational empires which once dominated central and eastern Europe, and the emergence of new successor states with unrecognised and overlapping borders. This fragmentation produced chaotic economic conditions as borders were frequently closed without warning, and the passage of goods and people consequently halted, delayed, or diverted. The peacemakers in Paris dispatched allied commissions in an attempt to resolve these problems. Using the files of several bodies sent to former Habsburg Silesia, this article elaborates on what this disintegrative moment meant for the region and its people. The turbulent events were not easily forgotten, and fostered visions of revenge, as well as European unity. One hundred years on and they still remain as an important historical reference point.

Latin-American railways have not general-comparative historical studies, although more recent publications generated valuable contributions to knowledge. The content and approach of the latest research resonate better into the international historiographical debates, incorporating perspectives that go beyond the national bias of previous works, avowing the previous stress on the region backwardness and economic inequalities. They also incorporate research about social, labor, and cultural-heritage topics, and about the necessity of resizing of the state role, and estimates on its direct contribution to growth. This article reviews such last new studies—except regarding cultural-heritage, because due to its scope the issue would precede a particular analysis—stating how these investigations can growth further.