Remembering Roadside America

Author : John A. Jakle
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 : 1572338334
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : John A. Jakle
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801869181
Total Pages : 1220 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Motel in America written by John A. Jakle and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 1220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second volume of the acclaimed "Gas, Food, Lodging" trilogy, authors John Jakle, Keith Sculle, and Jefferson Rogers take an informative, entertaining, and comprehensive look at the history of the motel. From the introduction of roadside tent camps and motor cabins in the 1910s to the wonderfully kitschy motels of the 1950s that line older roads and today's comfortable but anonymous chains that lure drivers off the interstate, Americans and their cars have found places to stay on their travels. Motels were more than just places to sleep, however. They were the places where many Americans saw their first color television, used their first coffee maker, and walked on their first shag carpet. Illustrated with more than 230 photographs, postcards, maps, and drawings, The Motel in America details the development of the motel as a commercial enterprise, its imaginative architectural expressions, and its evolution within the place-product-packaging concept along America's highways. As an integral part of America's landscape and culture, the motel finally receives the in-depth attention it deserves.

Author : Elsa Court
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030367339
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography written by Elsa Court and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography: 1955–1985 traces the origin of a postmodern iconography of mobile consumption equating roadside America with an authentic experience of the United States through the postwar road narrative, a narrative which, Elsa Court argues, has been shaped by and through white male émigré narratives of the American road, in both literature and visual culture. While stressing that these narratives are limited in their understanding of the processes of exclusion and unequal flux in experiences of modern automobility, the book works through four case studies in the American works of European-born authors Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Frank, Alfred Hitchcock, and Wim Wenders to unveil an early phenomenology of the postwar American highway, one that anticipates the works of late-twentieth-century spatial theorists Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Marc Augé and sketches a postmodern aesthetic of western mobility and consumption that has become synonymous with contemporary America.

Author : Tom Robbins
Publisher : Bantam
ISBN 13 : 0553897888
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Another Roadside Attraction written by Tom Robbins and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2003-06-17 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Written with a style and humor that haven’t been seen since Mark Twain.”—Los Angeles Times What if the Second Coming didn’t quite come off as advertised? What if “the Corpse” on display in that funky roadside zoo is really who they say it is—what does that portend for the future of western civilization? And what if a young clairvoyant named Amanda reestablishes the flea circus as popular entertainment and fertility worship as the principal religious form of our high-tech age? Another Roadside Attraction answers those questions and a lot more. It tell us, for example, what the sixties were truly all about, not by reporting on the psychedelic decade but by recreating it, from the inside out. In the process, this stunningly original seriocomic thriller is fully capable of simultaneously eating a literary hot dog and eroding the borders of the mind. “Hard to put down because of the sheer brilliance and fun of the writing. The sentiments of Brautigan and the joyously compassionate omniscience of Fielding dance through the pages garbed colorfully in the language of Joyce.”—Rolling Stone

Author : Jack Barth
Publisher : Fireside Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Roadside America written by Jack Barth and published by Fireside Books. This book was released on 1986 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 museum.

Author : Seth C. Bruggeman
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1442279206
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Commemoration written by Seth C. Bruggeman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-10-27 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commemoration: The American Association for State and Local History Guide serves as a handbook for historic site managers, heritage professionals, and all manner of public historians who contend daily with the ground-level complexities of commemoration. Its fourteen short essays are intended as tools for practitioners, students, and anyone else confronted with common problems in commemorative practice today. Of particular concern are strategies for expanding commemoration across the panoply of American identities, confronting tragedy and difficult pasts, and doing responsible work in the face of persistent economic and political turmoil. A special afterword explores the role of emotion in modern commemoration and what it suggests about possibilities for engaging new audiences.

Author : Gabrielle Esperdy
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813943108
Total Pages : 553 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Autopia written by Gabrielle Esperdy and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-28 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early to mid-twentieth-century America was the heyday of a car culture that has been called an "automobile utopia." In American Autopia, Gabrielle Esperdy examines how the automobile influenced architectural and urban discourse in the United States from the earliest days of the auto industry to the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. Paying particular attention to developments after World War II, Esperdy creates a narrative that extends from U.S. Routes 1 and 66 to the Las Vegas Strip to California freeways, with stops at gas stations, diners, main drags, shopping centers, and parking lots along the way. While it addresses the development of auto-oriented landscapes and infrastructures, American Autopia is not a conventional history, offering instead an exploration of the wide-ranging evolution of car-centric territories and drive-in typologies, looking at how they were scrutinized by diverse cultural observers in the middle of the twentieth century. Drawing on work published in the popular and professional press, and generously illustrated with evocative images, the book shows how figures as diverse as designer Victor Gruen, geographer Jean Gottmann, theorist Denise Scott Brown, critic J.B. Jackson, and historian Reyner Banham constructed "autopia" as a place and an idea. The result is an intellectual history and interpretive roadmap to the United States of the Automobile.

Author : Eric Zuelow
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0230369669
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A History of Modern Tourism written by Eric Zuelow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world, yet leisure travel is more than just economically important. It plays a vital role in defining who we are by helping to place us in space and time. In so doing, it has aesthetic, medical, political, cultural, and social implications. However, it hasn't always been so. Tourism as we know it is a surprisingly modern thing, both a product of modernity and a force helping to shape it. A History of Modern Tourism is the first book to track the origins and evolution of this pursuit from earliest times to the present. From a new understanding of aesthetics to scientific change, from the invention of steam power to the creation of aircraft, from an elite form of education to family car trips to see national 'shrines,' this book offers a sweeping and engaging overview of a fascinating story not yet widely known.

Author : Michael Hauser
Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1439640904
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Remembering Hudson's written by Michael Hauser and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2010-12-06 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The J. L. Hudson Company redefined the way Detroiters shopped and enjoyed leisure time. Many Detroiters share memories of times spent shopping and enjoying spectacular events sponsored by Hudson’s. A solid and lofty icon built by businesspeople who believed in their passion, Hudson’s defined Detroit’s downtown, creating trends and traditions in consumer culture that still resonate with us today. Now and in the future, as Hudson’s boxes, shopping bags, and artifacts are discovered in closets, attics, basements, and flea markets, many will remember that it was once as solid a civic fixture as the City-County Building or the Detroit Public Library.

Author : Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807875589
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Remembering Generations written by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-01-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery is America's family secret, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post-civil rights era. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Ashraf Rushdy situates these works in their cultural moment of production, highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family. Tracing the evolution of this literary form, he considers such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors. Remembering Generations examines how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility--of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society.