Download or read book America s First Highway written by Greg Roza and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take your readers on a trip back in time with this engaging book about the history of the first U.S. transcontinental highway. The trip begins with Carl G. Fisher and his vision of the Lincoln Highway, and continues through the planning, construction, use, and legacy of the great road.
Download or read book The Roads that Built America written by Dan McNichol and published by Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year 2006 celebrates the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Interstate System, the most incredible road system in the world. Created by Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose WW II experiences taught him the necessity of a superhighway for military transport and evacuation in wartime, today's Interstate System is what connects our coasts and our borders, our cities and small towns. It's made possible our suburban lifestyle and caused the vast proliferation of businesses from HoJos to Holiday Inns. And if you order something online, most likely it's a truck barreling along an interstate that gets the product to your door. Written by bestselling author Dan McNichol, The Roads that Built America is the fascinating story of the largest engineering project the world has ever known.
Download or read book America s Highways 1776 1976 written by United States. Federal Highway Administration and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book America s First Interstate written by Roger Pickenpaugh and published by Kent State University. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of America's first government-sponsored highway The National Road was the first major improved highway in the United States built by the federal government. Built between 1811 and 1837, this 620-mile road connected the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and was the main avenue to the West. Roger Pickenpaugh's comprehensive account is based on detailed archival research into documents that few scholars have examined, including sources from the National Archives, and details the promotion, construction, and use of this crucially important thoroughfare. America's First Interstate looks at the road from the perspective of westward expansion, stagecoach travel, freight hauling, livestock herding, and politics of construction as the project goes through changing presidential administrations. Pickenpaugh also describes how states assumed control of the road once the US government chose to abandon it, including the charging of tolls. His data-mining approach--revealing technical details, contracting procedures, lawsuits, charges and countercharges, local accounts of travel, and services along the road--provides a wealth of information for scholars to more critically consider the cultural and historical context of the Road's construction and use. While most of America's First Interstate covers the early days during the era of stagecoach and wagon traffic, the story continues to the decline of the road as railroads became prominent, its rebirth as US Route 40 during the automobile age, and its status in the present day.
Download or read book The American Highway written by William Kaszynski and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minnesota-based writer and photographer Kazynski traces the transformation of the US from a network of places connected by rutted wagon trails to a maze of highways connected to other highways. He describes and illustrates road and bridge construction and the new roadside culture that threw up motels, restaurants, gas stations, and scenic perspectives.
Download or read book America s First Highways written by Stephen H. Provost and published by America's Historic Highways. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the era of the interstate highway, before there was even a Route 66, there were auto trails. For a brief period in the early 20th century, these privately funded roads bridged the gap between the era of the stagecoach turnpike and the age of the federal highway.With names like the Yellowstone Trail, the National Old Trails Road and the famed Lincoln Highway, they offered the newly unshackled American tourist a way to hit the open road - even if that road was dirt or gravel, and you were liable to get lost along the way.The visionaries who built those roads and the carmakers who made it all possible. Did you know Henry Ford once set the land speed record ... on a frozen lake? Or that the National Football League was founded in an auto dealership? Or that the man behind the Lincoln Highway build the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and made Miami Beach a winter resort?You'll read about the first person to drive from coast to coast in an automobile (with a goggle-wearing bulldog) and the around-the-world contest that inspired the movie The Great Race. You'll also find stories of Dwight Eisenhower's 1919 cross-country trip that helped convince him of the need for an interstate highway system; and the auto camping craze that led to the first motels.But most of all, you'll learn about the auto trails themselves: How they came into being, their role in paving the way our federal highways, and their eventual demise. It's all here in a single volume packed with details and more than 200 historic and modern images. From the author of "Highway 99: The History of California's Main Street" and "Highway 101: The History of El Camino Real," "America's First Highways" is a companion to "Yesterday's Highways" and Volume II in the America's Historic Highways Series.
Download or read book Rethinking America s Highways written by Robert W. Poole and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-08-03 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A transportation expert makes a provocative case for changing the nation’s approach to highways, offering “bold, innovative thinking on infrastructure” (Rick Geddes, Cornell University). Americans spend hours every day sitting in traffic. And the roads they idle on are often rough and potholed, with exits, tunnels, guardrails, and bridges in terrible disrepair. According to transportation expert Robert Poole, this congestion and deterioration are outcomes of the way America manages its highways. Our twentieth-century model overly politicizes highway investment decisions, short-changing maintenance and often investing in projects whose costs exceed their benefits. In Rethinking America’s Highways, Poole examines how our current model of state-owned highways came about and why it is failing to satisfy its customers. He argues for a new model that treats highways themselves as public utilities—like electricity, telephones, and water supply. If highways were provided commercially, Poole argues, people would pay for highways based on how much they used, and the companies would issue revenue bonds to invest in facilities people were willing to pay for. Arguing for highway investments to be motivated by economic rather than political factors, this book makes a carefully-reasoned and well-documented case for a new approach to highways.
Download or read book Yesterday s Highways written by Stephen H. Provost and published by . This book was released on 2020-02-16 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relive the history of the American highway from its origins in the era of the covered wagon through the age of the interstate. Illustrated with more than 400 images from roads across the country, "Yesterday's Highways" takes you back to the old auto trails that paved the way for the first federal highway system. You'll visit the diners, motels, filling stations and quirky roadside haunts of yesteryear. From White Castle to Howard Johnson's, learn about how the American road served up burgers and coffee and blue-plate specials to weary truckers and vacationing families. Journey back to the age of auto camps and revisit the time when mom-and-pop motel courts ruled the side of the road. Before the advent of off-ramps and car-pool lanes, highways zigzagged through downtowns across the heartland, turning at stop signs and following rail lines. Cars chugged along at 15 mph over gravel roads and narrow, concrete ribbons with dozens of hairpin turns. Drivers were treated to barn ads and billboards and Burma-Shave signs. The Lincoln Highway. Route 66. Highway 99. El Camino Real. The Great Valley Road. Travel back in time and experience what made these roads and so many others the lifeblood of the American experience.
Download or read book Blue Highways written by William Least Heat-Moon and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads. William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map -- if they get on at all -- only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi." His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.
Download or read book Killer on the Road written by Ginger Strand and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2012-04-04 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them—the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher,” the “Freeway Killer,” the “Killer on the Road,” the “I-5 Strangler,” and the “Beltway Sniper.” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time. Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation, and how we came to equate them with violence. Through the stories of highway killers, we see how the “killer on the road,” like the train robber, the gangster, and the mobster, entered the cast of American outlaws, and how the freeway—conceived as a road to utopia—came to be feared as a highway to hell.
Download or read book The Big Roads written by Earl Swift and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-06-09 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the twists and turns of one of America’s great infrastructure projects with this “engrossing history of the creation of the U.S. interstate system” (Los Angeles Times). It’s become a part of the landscape that we take for granted, the site of rumbling eighteen-wheelers and roadside rest stops, a familiar route for commuters and vacationing families. But during the twentieth century, the interstate highway system dramatically changed the face of our nation. These interconnected roads—over 47,000 miles of them—are man-made wonders, economic pipelines, agents of sprawl, uniquely American symbols of escape and freedom, and an unrivaled public works accomplishment. Though officially named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower, this network of roadways has origins that reach all the way back to the World War I era, and The Big Roads—“the first thorough history of the expressway system” (The Washington Post)—tells the full story of how they came to be. From the speed demon who inspired a primitive web of dirt auto trails to the largely forgotten technocrats who planned the system years before Ike reached the White House to the city dwellers who resisted the concrete juggernaut when it bore down on their neighborhoods, this book reveals both the massive scale of this government engineering project, and the individual lives that have been transformed by it. A fast-paced history filled with fascinating detours, “the book is a road geek’s treasure—and everyone who travels the highways ought to know these stories” (Kirkus Reviews).
Download or read book Traveling the National Road written by Merritt Ierley and published by Overlook Books. This book was released on 1990 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The life story of America's first highway -- born as an Indian footpath, known over the years as the National Road and the National Pike, and surviving as U.S. Route 40 -- told firsthand by those who knew the road best: countless generations of passerby who included such historical personalities as Andrew Jackson and Davey Crockett."--Back cover.
Download or read book Greetings from the Lincoln Highway written by Brian Butko and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian Brian Butko follows the highway across 14 states. Memoirs and historic landmarks come to life in full color.
Download or read book The Eisenhower Interstate System written by John Murphy and published by Chelsea House. This book was released on 2009 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the construction of the interstate highway system.
Download or read book Divided Highways written by Tom Lewis and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Divided Highways, Tom Lewis tells the monumental story of the largest engineered structure ever built: the Interstate Highway System. Here is one of the great untold tales of American enterprise, recounted entirely through the stories of the human beings who thought up, mapped out, poured, paved - and tried to stop - the Interstates. Conceived and spearheaded by Thomas "the Chief" MacDonald, the iron-willed bureaucrat from the muddy farmlands of Iowa who rose to unrivaled power, the highway system was propelled forward through the pathbreaking efforts of brilliant engineers, argued over by politicians of every ideological and moral stripe, reviled by the citizens whose lives it devastated, and lauded as the greatest public works project in U.S. history.
Download or read book The Lincoln Highway written by Amor Towles and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER More than ONE MILLION copies sold A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick A New York Times Notable Book, and Chosen by Oprah Daily, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bill Gates and Barack Obama as a Best Book of the Year “Wise and wildly entertaining . . . permeated with light, wit, youth.” —The New York Times Book Review “A classic that we will read for years to come.” —Jenna Bush Hager, Read with Jenna book club “Fantastic. Set in 1954, Towles uses the story of two brothers to show that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as we might hope.” —Bill Gates “A real joyride . . . elegantly constructed and compulsively readable.” —NPR The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes. “Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes. Towles is not a one-trick pony. Like all the best storytellers, he has range. He takes inspiration from famous hero’s journeys, including The Iliad, The Odyssey, Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men. He seems to be saying that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as an interstate highway. But, he suggests, when something (or someone) tries to steer us off course, it is possible to take the wheel.” – Bill Gates
Download or read book All Roads Lead to the American City written by Peter Swirski and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All Roads Lead to the American City provides an original view of the urban culture in America seen through its irrevocable ties with the cities and roads. Examining the history, cinema, literature, cultural myths and social geography of the United States, the book puts some of the greatest as well as the "baddest" American cities under the microscope. Taking the role of the roads that crisscross and connect the cities as their shared point of reference, these essays explore ways to understand the people who live, commute, work, create, govern, commit crime and conduct business in them.Cities, for the most part, are America. Their values and problems define not only what the United States is, but what other nations perceive the United States to be. Roads and transportation, on the other hand, and their impact on the American culture and lifestyle, form not only the integral part of the historical rise-and-shine of the modern city, but a physical release from and a cultural antidote to its pressure-cooker stresses. Tracing the boundless variety and complexity of these twin themes, All Roads Lead to the American City is built around an interlinked series of essays on the urban culture in America. Juxtaposing the city and the road, it looks alternatively at cities as historical, geographical, social and cultural centres of life in the land, and at roads as physical as well as metaphorical arteries that lead in and out of the city.
