This week on C-SPAN's Lectures in History podcast, a class on the U.S. Auto Industry Mavericks from the post-World War II era through the present day.

University of Central Florida professor Yannick Mekowski discusses the successes and failures of people such as Harley Earl, Preston Tucker, John

DeLorean, and Elon Musk.

All right. So today we're studying the post-World War II domestic scene. In the last class,

we looked at the surging economy of the post-World War II era

and suburbanization. And today, what I want to look at is cars in the post-World War II era.

And I especially want to look at what I call the Mavericks, a Maverick car designer and

Maverick automakers. Automakers who tried to establish independent companies

outside the big three. Mavericks who thought outside the box, thought unconventionally.

And so I want to look at their impact, what happened to them, their influence on the

field of the post-World War II auto industry. And, you know, if America had

a symbol in the post-World War II era, it would have to be the automobile. I mean, Americans love

their cars. They're big. Europeans even make fun of them. They call them yank tanks. And there's a

reason that cars, American cars

anyways, have the look and the shape and the size that they do. And a lot of it has to do with

one automobile designer, one sort of maverick automobile designer. And I want to look at him today.

And I want to start by sort of in a nutshell looking at some of the reasons why

cars were so important and how that was reflected in post-World War II society and in the

economy. So I've listed four basic reasons why the demand for cars surged and the impact that cars had in the post-World War II

era. First of all, the idea of pent-up demand. You had the Great Depression, and we looked at that

earlier in this course, and people had trouble buying necessities during the Great Depression,

let alone cars, let alone luxury cars.

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