The big roads : the untold story of the engineers, visionaries, and trailblazers who created the American superhighways / Earl Swift.
2011
TE23 .S95 2011 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection
Items
Details
Title
The big roads : the untold story of the engineers, visionaries, and trailblazers who created the American superhighways / Earl Swift.
Author
ISBN
9780618812417
0618812415
0618812415
Publication Details
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
Language
English
Description
375 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Call Number
TE23 .S95 2011
Dewey Decimal Classification
388.1/22092273
Summary
"A history of the planning, construction, and impact of the U.S. interstate highway system"-- Provided by publisher.
A man-made wonder, a connective network, an economic force, a bringer of blight and sprawl and the possibility of escape--the U.S. interstate system transformed America. The Big Roads presents the surprising history of how we got from dirt tracks to expressways in the span of a single lifetime. From the turn-of-the-century car-racing entrepreneur who spurred the "Good Roads" movement, to the handful of driven engineers who conceived of the interstates and how they would work--years before President Eisenhower knew the plans existed--to the protests that erupted when the projects encountered people unwilling to be uprooted in the name of progress, Swift follows a winding route through the dreams, discoveries and protest that shaped these mighty roads, and shows how the interstates embody the wanderlust, grand scale, and conflicting notions of citizenship and progress that define America.--From publisher description.
A man-made wonder, a connective network, an economic force, a bringer of blight and sprawl and the possibility of escape--the U.S. interstate system transformed America. The Big Roads presents the surprising history of how we got from dirt tracks to expressways in the span of a single lifetime. From the turn-of-the-century car-racing entrepreneur who spurred the "Good Roads" movement, to the handful of driven engineers who conceived of the interstates and how they would work--years before President Eisenhower knew the plans existed--to the protests that erupted when the projects encountered people unwilling to be uprooted in the name of progress, Swift follows a winding route through the dreams, discoveries and protest that shaped these mighty roads, and shows how the interstates embody the wanderlust, grand scale, and conflicting notions of citizenship and progress that define America.--From publisher description.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Record Appears in
Table of Contents
Out of the mud
Connecting the dots
The crooked straight, the rough places plain
The human obstacle.
Connecting the dots
The crooked straight, the rough places plain
The human obstacle.