Motoring: The Highway Experience in America

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.

"In their latest collaboration (after 2004's Lots of Parking: Land Use is a Car Culture), University of Illinois landscape architecture professor Jakle and Illinois Historic Preservation Agency researcher Sculle take a detailed look at the history of the American highway, and the cascade of commercial and sociological changes it precipitated. Providing a driver's-eye-view of 'motoring,' Jakle and Sculle follow the development of the modern road system, from the first 'named' highways through federally-subsidized state departments, focusing on 'tourist travel, the source of motoring's early exhilaration, which energized much of what came after, such as commuting and the journey to shop.' They look also at attendant industries like repair shops and gas stations, fast-food restaurants and motels, amusement parks and fresh fruit stands that collectively make the roadside 'a place of legendary recreation.' Though equally thorough, subsequent chapters on truck culture and bus travel prove less engrossing; otherwise, a compelling read about America's fascination with the open road. 75 b&w photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

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."