Thumbing a Ride

Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada

Häftad, Engelska, 2019

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In the 1920s, as a national network of roads and youth hostels spread across Canada, so did the practice of hitchhiking. By the 1960s, the Trans-Canada Highway had become the main thoroughfare for thousands of young baby boomers seeking adventure. Thumbing a Ride examines the rise and fall of hitchhiking and hostelling in the 1970s, drawing on records from the time. Many equated adventure travel with freedom, but a counter-narrative emerged of girls gone missing and other dangers. Town councillors, community groups, and motorists called for a nationwide clampdown on a transient youth movement that they believed was spreading hippie sensibilities and anti-establishment nomadism. Linda Mahood unearths good and bad stories and key biographical moments that formed young travellers' understandings of personal risk, agency, and national identity. Thumbing a Ride asks new questions about hitchhiking as a rite of passage, and about the adult interventions that turned a subculture into a moral and social issue.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2019-03-15
Mått152 x 229 x undefined mm
Vikt520 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor344
FörlagUniversity of British Columbia Press
ISBN9780774837347

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Linda Mahood is a professor of history at the University of Guelph. She is the author of The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the 19th Century; Policing Gender, Class and Family in Britain, 1850–1940; and Feminism and Voluntary Action: Eglantyne Jebb and Save the Children, 1876–1928; and co-editor, with Bernard Schissel, of Social Control in Canada: A Reader on the Social Construction of Deviance. She is also the recipient of two distinguished teaching awards.

1 Get your Motor Running: Risk, Ritual, and Rite of Passage Travel2 Thumb Wars: Adventure Hitchhiking3 Rucksack Revolution: Quest in the Age of Aquarius4 Cool-Aid: The Transient Youth Movement5 Crash Pads: Blue-Jean Bureaucrats versus the Canadian Youth Hostels Association6 Head Out on the Highway: Stories from the Trans-Canada Highway7 Car Sick: Hitchhiking Dos and Don'tsConclusion: The Vanishing Hitchhiker EulogyNotesIndex

Thumbing a Ride explores hitchhiking's resurgence in Canada during the 1970s, when the then-teenage Mahood took to the road, thumb stretched out, seeking rides. In her concise but wide-ranging study, the author focuses on the mobility of young Canadians, their willingness to take risks, and travel as a rite of passage. Summing Up: Recommended.- R.C. Cottrell, California State University, Chico (CHOICE)