The automobile is a well-tilled subject in American history, but new conceptual equipment sometimes produces scholarly yields from seemingly exhausted soil. Such is the case with Cotten Seiler's cultural history of American automobility, which bypasses familiar topics to focus on the act of driving and how it has shaped the public self of Americans. He does this by employing the conceptual apparatus of poststructuralism, which sees subjectivity not as the foundation of freedom but as a dependent artifact engendered by power structures to exert control. Seiler argues that movement in cars created a narrative of individual freedom that ironically turned Americans into submissive subjects of the liberal capitalist nation-state. The book focuses on two periods, 1895 to 1929 and the 1950s, during which capitalist liberal hegemony was threatened by changes that destabilized the individualist concept of selfhood. In both periods automobility drove to the rescue of that hegemony by redefining individualism in a form compatible with the new arrangements of power. The first threat came at the end of the nineteenth century with the emergence of large industrial firms that Taylorized labor and destroyed craftsmen's autonomy. This change undermined the nation's foundational concept of possessive individualism, which derived selfhood from autonomy of economic effort. But it also gave rise to the new self-concept of expressive individualism, based not on work effort but consumer choice. The automobile quickly became the centerpiece of this compensatory consumer culture, for the speed and movement it allowed dramatized a new masculine self of agency and revitalization that cut across class boundaries. The status of women in this new car culture was contested, however. Although some initially saw female drivers as a threat to male selfhood, by the late 1920s women's automobility had accommodated them to a reformed patriarchy that offered the “independence” to be better family servants and consumers.