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The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
June 2011
On Sale: July 9, 2011
384 pages
ISBN: 0618812415
EAN: 9780618812417
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
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 changed the face of our
country. The Big Roads charts the creation of these
essential American highways. From the turn-of-the-century
car racing entrepreneur who spurred the citizen-led “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 across the nation when highways
reached the cities and found people unwilling to be uprooted
in the name of progress, Swift follows a winding,
fascinating route through twentieth-century American life. How did we get from dirt tracks to expressways, from main
streets to off-ramps, from mud to concrete and steel, in
less than a century? Through decades of politics, activism,
and marvels of engineering, we recognize in our highways the
wanderlust, grand scale, and conflicting notions of
citizenship and progress that define America.
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