From tuner culture to car history in the classroom, automotive heritage conference to give scholarly context to old cars

Photo by the author.

Scandinavian attitudes toward automotive preservation. Preserving the skills necessary for auto restoration. How scrappage programs have influenced old car collectability. The slate of presentations at next month’s Putting Preservation on the Road conference might seem varied, but they all have a part to play in elevating automotive heritage from grassroots enthusiasm to academic pursuit.

“We haven’t developed a serious program around automotive heritage, and that’s the underlying core objective of this conference,” said Mark Gessler, one of the conference’s organizers and president of the Historic Vehicle Association. “We want the general public and future generations to know how the automobile evolved and shaped our culture.”

Though this will be the first such conference, it attracted more than 40 auto historians, restorers, and experts from a variety of backgrounds who agreed to present research papers over the three-day event. While the conference initially appeared oriented toward automotive preservation, both Gessler and Barry Stiefel, another conference organizer and an assistant professor at the College of Charleston, said that preservation will simply be one approach among many that the conference will take toward understanding the automobile’s place in society.

“We want to think more critically about why a vehicle is important beyond its make, model, and value,” Stiefel said. “Just like when we go to preserve a historically important building – before the preservation begins, we always research why this building deserves the attention and the preservation work.”

Stiefel cited as an example an undergraduate class focusing on automotive heritage that he began teaching this term at the College of Charleston. The two dozen or so students in the class have been tasked with researching the Anderson automobile, built in Rock Hill, South Carolina, from 1916 to 1925, with the ultimate goal of nominating one of the 10 surviving Andersons to the National Historic Vehicle Register. Rather than reiterate the basic history of the marque, however, they have looked into the provenances of the existing cars, researched the demographics of Anderson buyers, and spoken with the descendants of the company founders.

“Just looking at their histories is fine, but we’re also using that as a tool to determine how to properly preserve these cars,” he said.

Ultimately, both Gessler and Stiefel said they intend this conference – as well as a publication of the conference’s proceedings – to inspire the creation of academic programs focused on automotive heritage, similar to the 60 or so programs currently in the United States that teach preservation of buildings, monuments, and other fixed objects.

Among the presentations scheduled for the conference will be Gundula Tutt’s “Restoring the ‘Unrestored’: New challenges in the Preservation of Historic Vehicles”; Brian Yopp‘s “Evolution of Automotive Culture in Southeast Michigan through Ethnic Minority Groups”; Jeremy C. Wells’s “Differences of ‘Substance’ between the Treatment of Historic Automobiles and Buildings: Impacts on Practice and Collaboration”; J. Douglas Leighton’s “The SAH: Its Mission, and Automotive History in the Classroom”; Luke Chennell’s “The ‘Original’ Car: Conservation, Preservation, and the Dilemma of Mass Production”; Greg Bruno’s “(Honda) Civic Engagement: Tuner Culture after the 1979 Energy Crisis”; Hilary Grossman’s “Historical Significance and Preservation of New York City’s Automobile Infrastructure Beginnings”; Kit Foster‘s “Making History: Pursuing a Car’s Precarious Past”; and Forest Casey’s “A Hierarchy of Hot Rods: Eight Case Studies in Extreme Customization.”

The conference will also include a talk by Alfieri Maserati, a screening of a documentary on cultural collaboration with the automotive industry, and workshop demonstrations.

The Putting Preservation on the Road conference will take place October 20 through 22 at the HVA’s Research Laboratory in Allentown, Pennsylvania. For more information about the conference and a full list of the conference presentations, visit HistoricVehicle.org.

See original article at" https://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2016/09/14/from-tuner-culture-to-car-history-in-the-classroom-automotive-heritage-conference-to-give-scholarly-context-to-old-cars/