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Cultural History

2009

Providence

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in History

The Highway Revolution, 1895–1925: How The United States Got Out Of The Mud (Review), Michael R. Fein Apr 2009

The Highway Revolution, 1895–1925: How The United States Got Out Of The Mud (Review), Michael R. Fein

Humanities Department Faculty Publications & Research

No abstract provided.


A Political Turn: Highways And Mass Transit In American Mobility History, Michael R. Fein Ph.D. Jan 2009

A Political Turn: Highways And Mass Transit In American Mobility History, Michael R. Fein Ph.D.

Humanities Department Faculty Publications & Research

Mark Rose’s Interstate: Express Highway Politics (1979) and Bruce Seely’s Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (1987) signaled the opening of U.S. highway politics as a field for sustained scholarly investigation. In Interstate, Rose examined the political competition among interest groups, such as truck operators, that produced the landmark 1956 highway legislation. Seely’s focus was the road engineers themselves, led by Thomas MacDonald, whose uncanny ability to present themselves as ‘apolitical’ experts paradoxically allowed them to dominate the highly politicized drafting of the main contours of American highway policy. Together these two texts opened a range of …


The Public Interest, Spectrum Markets And The American Experience With Radio Regulation: Historical And Comparative Lessons For The European Union, Michael R. Fein Ph.D. Jan 2009

The Public Interest, Spectrum Markets And The American Experience With Radio Regulation: Historical And Comparative Lessons For The European Union, Michael R. Fein Ph.D.

Humanities Department Faculty Publications & Research

This chapter reflects on radio spectrum management in the United States, with the aim of identifying useful historical and comparative lessons for European Union policy makers as they contemplate the adoption of pan-European market mechanisms to allocate radio frequencies. It explores the history of American radio regulation and the impact of conflicting interpretations of that history on contemporary policy debates surrounding the liberalization of spectrum markets. The public interest theory of policy making has long been critiqued as inappropriate to spectrum management by economists following the lead of Ronald Coase. But the American experience with radio regulation suggests that economic …