Motoring : the highway experience in America / John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle.
Jakle, John A.; Sculle, Keith A.
2008
GV1021 .J33 2008 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection

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Title Motoring : the highway experience in America / John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle.
Author Jakle, John A.
ISBN 9780820334158 (pbk. : alk. paper)
0820334154 (pbk. : alk. paper)
9780820330280 (alk. paper)
0820330280 (alk. paper)
Imprint Athens : University of Georgia Press ; Chicago : In association with the Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, c2008.
Language English
Description 274 p. : ill., maps ; 23 cm.
Call Number GV1021 .J33 2008
Dewey Decimal Classification 917.304
Summary Product Description: Motoring unmasks the forces that shape the American driving experience-commercial, aesthetic, cultural, mechanical-as it takes a timely look back at our historically unconditional love of motor travel. Focusing on recreational travel between 1900 and 1960, John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle cover dozens of topics related to drivers, cars, and highways and explain how they all converge to uphold that illusory notion of release and rejuvenation we call the "open road." Jakle and Sculle have collaborated on five previous books on the history, culture, and landscape of the American road. Here, with an emphasis on the driver's perspective, they discuss garages and gas stations, roadside tourist attractions, freeways and toll roads, truck stops, bus travel, the rise of the convenience store, and much more. All the while, the authors make us think about aspects of driving that are often taken for granted: how, for instance, the many lodging and food options along our highways reinforce the connection between driving and "freedom" and how, by enabling greater speeds, highway engineers helped to stoke motorists' "blessed fantasy of flight." Although driving originally celebrated freedom and touted a common experience, it has increasingly become a highly regulated, isolated activity. The motive behind America's first embrace of the automobile-individual prerogative-still substantially obscures this reality. "Americans did not have the automobile imposed on them," say the authors. Jakle and Sculle ask why some of the early prophetic warnings about our car culture went unheeded and why the arguments of its promoters resonated so persuasively. Today, the automobile is implicated in any number of environmental, even social, problems. As the wisdom of our dependence on automobile travel has come into serious question, reassessment of how we first became that way is more important than ever.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Added Author Sculle, Keith A.
Series Center books on American places.
Linked Resources Table of contents only
Record Appears in On-Campus Resources > Books
All Resources
Motoring : an introduction
America's good roads search
Detour ahead : rebuilding America's roads
Highways as public prerogative
Dealerships and garages
The tourist's roadside
Rejecting the roadside as landscaped landscape
Limited-access highways as dream fulfillment
Motoring by truck
Motoring by bus
Convenience in store
The highway experience : a conclusion.

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