Remembering Roadside America

Remembering Roadside America
Author :
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages : 310
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781572338333
ISBN-13 : 1572338334
Rating : 4/5 (334 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Remembering Roadside America by : John A. Jakle

Download or read book Remembering Roadside America written by John A. Jakle and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten. In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history. Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.” John A. Jakle is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the former head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. They have coauthored such books as America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Automobile Age; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; and The Gas Station in America.


Remembering Roadside America Related Books

The New Roadside America
Language: en
Pages: 0
Authors: Doug Kirby
Categories: Automobile travel
Type: BOOK - Published: 1992 - Publisher: Touchstone

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

There are wacky, one-of-a-kind treasures lurking among the Gaps and Burger Kings alongside our highways and byways, and The New Roadside America hightlights the
Roadside America
Language: en
Pages: 232
Authors: Jack Barth
Categories: Automobile travel
Type: BOOK - Published: 1986 - Publisher: Fireside Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A trivia-filled odyssey across America that tells the reader, for example, where to see the world's largest twine ball and how to locate the Lawrence Welk museu
Roadside Americans
Language: en
Pages: 264
Authors: Jack Reid
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-02-14 - Publisher: UNC Press Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Between the Great Depression and the mid-1970s, hitchhikers were a common sight for motorists, as American service members, students, and adventurers sought out
Roadside America
Language: en
Pages: 271
Authors: Lucinda Lewis
Categories: Transportation
Type: BOOK - Published: 2000-10-01 - Publisher: Harry N. Abrams

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Both the most complete survey available of 20th-century American cars & a glorious, nostalgic photographic portrait of the icons of roadside America.
Remembering Roadside America
Language: en
Pages: 310
Authors: John A. Jakle
Categories: Architecture
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-09-30 - Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of