front cover of The Appian Way
The Appian Way
Ghost Road, Queen of Roads
Robert A. Kaster
University of Chicago Press, 2012

The Roman poet Statius called the via Appia “the Queen of Roads,” and for nearly a thousand years that description held true, as countless travelers trod its path from the center of Rome to the heel of Italy. Today, the road is all but gone, destroyed by time, neglect, and the incursions of modernity; to travel the Appian Way today is to be a seeker, and to walk in the footsteps of ghosts.

Our guide to those ghosts—and the layers of history they represent—is Robert A. Kaster. In The Appian Way, he brings a lifetime of studying Roman literature and history to his adventures along the ancient highway. A footsore Roman soldier pushing the imperial power south; craftsmen and farmers bringing their goods to the towns that lined the road; pious pilgrims headed to Jerusalem, using stage-by-stage directions we can still follow—all come to life once more as Kaster walks (and drives—and suffers car trouble) on what’s left of the Appian Way. Other voices help him tell the story: Cicero, Goethe, Hawthorne, Dickens, James, and even Monty Python offer commentary, insight, and curmudgeonly grumbles, their voices blending like the ages of the road to create a telescopic, perhaps kaleidoscopic, view of present and past.

To stand on the remnants of the Via Appia today is to stand in the pathway of history. With The Appian Way, Kaster invites us to close our eyes and walk with him back in time, to the campaigns of Garibaldi, the revolt of Spartacus, and the glory days of Imperial Rome. No traveler will want to miss this fascinating journey.

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front cover of Backroads, New Jersey
Backroads, New Jersey
Driving at the Speed of Life
Di Ionno, Mark
Rutgers University Press, 2002

Mark Di Ionno is a Jersey guy through and through. He’s lived in fifteen different towns in six different New Jersey counties. He’s been a journalist for the state’s top newspapers, currently the Star-Ledger, where his first job was to go out and write about things that were “interesting.” Who better to take readers on a personal tour of the backroads of New Jersey?

In Backroads, New Jersey, Di Ionno leads readers off the congested interstates with their commonplace scenery to the seldom-explored secondary roads, where the real life of the state can be found. These inter-county or 500 series roads are a 6,788-mile network of mostly one-lane highways. Marked by blue-and-yellow five-sided shields bearing county names, they make up more than 20 percent of New Jersey’s public roads. They are never the fastest or most direct way to get anywhere, but when you break out of the towns and hit the country, they are a pleasure to drive.

Travel with Di Ionno as he takes readers to see the state’s amazing beauty¾from the dizzying cliffs of the Palisades, to the blunted peaks of the Highlands and Kittatinny Ridges, to the rolling hills of Morris, Hunterdon, and Somerset counties, to the topsoil-wealthy agricultural belts of Monmouth and the southern counties, to the flat, sandy beaches of the 127-mile Jersey Shore. Travel with him as he shows us the homes of New Jersey’s culturally diverse population, whose men and women work at everything from farms to pharmacies, from banks to auto assembly lines. And travel with him as he recounts the history made along the back country roads in towns like Rocky Hill, where George Washington wrote his farewell orders. Di Ionno calls New Jersey “a place of infinite natural beauty, a place of intricate human patterns. A place where you can see a lot in a little time. This is, simply put, the overriding theme of this book. New Jersey is a restless state for restless people. A state for wanderers to explore.” Backroads, New Jersey is a rare chance to see it all through the eyes of a well-traveled Jerseyan. Happy wandering!

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Building the King’s Highway
Labor, Society, and Family on Mexico’s Caminos Reales, 1757-1804
Bruce A. Castleman
University of Arizona Press, 2005
The importance of the silver trade to the Spanish colonial effort is well documented, as it opened up an exchange of goods with Europe and Asia. Lesser known is the story of the roads on which this trade moved and the people responsible for building them.

Focusing on the camino real linking Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, Bruce Castleman has written a social history of road construction laborers in late Bourbon Mexico. He has drawn on employment and census records to study a major shift in methods used by the Spanish colonial regime to mobilize the supply of unskilled labor—and concomitant changes in the identities those laborers asserted for themselves.

Through a close analysis of wages actually paid to named individuals from one week to the next, Castleman opens a new window on Mexican history. In the 1760s, a free-wage labor regime replaced a draft-labor system, and by examining records of road construction he traces both this transformation and its implications. During this time, free-wage artisans saw their earnings reduced, and they were pushed into the labor pool, and Castleman reveals how a shift occurred in the way that laborers identified themselves as the Spanish casta system of racial classification became increasingly fluid.

In his study, Castleman introduces some of the principle players of eighteenth-century Mexico, from viceroys to tobacco planters to military engineers. He then fleshes out the lives of working persons, drawing on a complete set of construction records from the construction of the Puente de Escamela at Orizaba to forge a collective biography that considers their existences apart from the workplace. By linking census and employment records, he uncovers a host of social indicators such as marriage preference, family structure, and differences over time in how the caste system was used to classify people according to ancestry.

As Castleman shows, roads did not so much link Mexico to the global economy as forge regional markets within New Spain, and his work provides an astute analysis of struggles between the Bourbon colonial state, the important consulados of Mexico City and Veracruz, and more localized interests over road policy. More important, Building the King’s Highway provides a valuable new perspective on people’s lives as it advances our understanding of labor in late colonial Latin America.

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Creating Green Roadways
Integrating Cultural, Natural, and Visual Resources into Transportation
James L. Sipes and Matthew L. Sipes
Island Press, 2012
Roads and parking lots in the United States cover more ground than the entire state of Georgia. And while proponents of sustainable transit often focus on getting people off the roads, they will remain at the heart of our transportation systems for the foreseeable future. In Creating Green Roadways, James and Matthew Sipes demonstrate that roads don’t have to be the enemy of sustainability: they can be designed to minimally impact the environment while improving quality of life.
 
The authors examine traditional, utilitarian methods of transportation planning that have resulted in a host of negative impacts: from urban sprawl and congestion to loss of community identity and excess air and water pollution. They offer a better approach—one that blends form and function. Creating Green Roadways covers topics including transportation policy, the basics of green road design, including an examination of complete streets, public involvement, road ecology, and the economics of sustainable roads. Case studies from metropolitan, suburban, and rural transportation projects around the country, along with numerous photographs, illustrate what makes a project successful.
 
The need for this information has never been greater, as more than thirty percent of America’s major roads are in poor or mediocre condition, more than a quarter of the nation’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, and congestion in communities of all sizes has never been worse. Creating Green Roadways offers a practical strategy for rethinking how we design, plan, and maintain our transportation infrastructure.
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Crooked Road
The Story of the Alaska Highway
David A. Remley
University of Alaska Press, 2008
Crooked Road tells the tale of how the Alaska Highway was built during World War II. David Remley chronicles how Americans and Canadians mapped and built the highway under the 1942 authorization of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who ordered its construction for the joint defense of the United States and Canada. Crooked Road draws upon archival images and oral histories from those who lived in the prior unpaved wilderness and those who regularly drive on the highway today, and ultimately offers a fascinating historical account of the expansion of the American landscape.
 
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The Cultural Life of the Automobile
Roads to Modernity
By Guillermo Giucci
University of Texas Press, 2012

From its invention in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, the automobile crisscrossed the world, completely took over the cities, and became a feature of daily life. Considered basic to the American lifestyle, the car reflected individualism, pragmatism, comfort, and above all modernity. In Latin America, it served as a symbol of distinction, similar to jewelry or fine clothing. In The Cultural Life of the Automobile, Guillermo Giucci focuses on the automobile as an instrument of social change through its “kinetic modernity” and as an embodiment of the tremendous social impact of technology on cultural life.

Material culture—how certain objects generate a wide array of cultural responses—has been the focus of much scholarly discussion in recent years. The automobile wrought major changes and inspired images in language, literature, and popular culture. Focusing primarily on Latin America but also covering the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa, Giucci examines how the automobile was variously adapted by different cultures and how its use shaped and changed social and economic relationships within them. At the same time, he shows how the “automobilization” of society became an essential support for the development of modern individualism, and the automobile its clearest material manifestation.

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Driving Europe
Building Europe on Roads in the Twentieth Century (Technology and Europe History) (Volume 3)
Frank Schipper
Amsterdam University Press, 2009
Today we can hardly imagine life in Europe without roads and the automobiles that move people and goods around. In fact, the vast majority of movement in Europe takes place on the road. Travelers use the car to explore parts of the continent on their holidays, and goods travel large distances to reach consumers. Indeed, the twentieth century has deservedly been characteried as the century of the car. The situation looked very different around 1900. People crossing national borders by car encountered multiple hurdles on their way. Technically, they imported their vehicle into a neighboring country and had to pay astronomic import duties. Often they needed to pass a driving test in each country they visited. Early on, automobile and touring clubs sought to make life easier for traveling motorists. International negotiations tackled the problems arising from differing regulations. The resulting volume describes everything from the standardied traffic signs that saved human lives on the road to the Europabus taking tourists from Stockholm to Rome in the 1950s. Driving Europe offers a highly original portrait of a Europe built on roads in the course of the twentieth century.
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front cover of Getting Out of the Mud
Getting Out of the Mud
The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928
Martin T. Olliff, Foreword by David O. Whitten
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Recounts the history of the Good Roads Movement that arose in progressive-era Alabama, how it used the power of the state to achieve its objectives of improving market roads for farmers and highways for automobiles

Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928 explores the history of the Good Roads Movement and investigates the nature of early twentieth-century progressivism in the state. Martin T. Olliff reveals how middle-class reformers secured political, economic, and social power not only by fighting against corporate domination and labor recalcitrance but also by proposing alternative projects like road improvement and identifying the interests of the rising middle class as being the most important to public interest.
 
With the development of national markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans began to regard the nation as a whole, rather than their state or region, as the most important political entity. Many Alabamians wished to travel beyond their local communities in all seasons without getting stuck in the mud of rudimentary rutted dirt roads. The onset of the automobile age bolstered the need for roadmaking, alerting both automobilists and good roads advocates to the possibility of a new transportation infrastructure. The Good Roads Movement began promoting farm-to-market roads, then highways that linked cities, then those that connected states. Federal matching funds for road construction after 1916 led state and federal governments to supplant the Good Roads Movement, building and administering the highway system that emerged by the late 1920s.
 
Olliff’s study of how Alabamians dealt with strained resources and overcame serious political obstacles in order to construct a road system that would accommodate economic growth in the twentieth century may offer clues to the resurrection of a similar strategy in our modern era. Many problems are unchanged over the hundred years between crises: Alabamians demand good roads and a government that has the capacity to build and maintain such an infrastructure while, at the same time, citizens are voting into office men and women who promise lower taxes and smaller government.
[more]

front cover of Getting There
Getting There
The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century
Stephen B. Goddard
University of Chicago Press, 1996
"A readable and concise overview of how U.S. transportation came to its present pass. . . . Goddard is at his best when recounting the complex and interesting history of what has come to be called 'the highway lobby.'. . . An excellent book for the general reader with an interest in getting around."—Larry Fish, Philadelphia Inquirer

"This is a riveting story: of mighty railroads hamstrung almost overnight by government bureaucrats; of road interests led by General Motors Corp. conspiring in city after city to destroy efficient trolley systems . . . and of freeways that are far from free."—Bill Laitner, Detroit Free Press

"The combination of forces and fates that turned America into a giant parking lot from sea to shining sea is the subject of Stephen B. Goddard's lively pop history. . . . As Mr. Goddard ably points out, road-building and the creation of car-dependent suburbs have become ends in themselves."—James Howard Kunstler, Wall Street Journal

"The strength of Goddard's book is that he understands the complexities of manipulating public opinion to influence legislatures."—David Young, Chicago Tribune

"[Goddard's] book is a deft and easily read history of how transportation has shaped the nation and its economy, and ultimately, how a federation of truck and car interests drastically tilted national policies. . . . For many reasons this is an exceptionally important work."—Jim Dwyer, New York Newsday
[more]

front cover of Illinois Trails & Traces
Illinois Trails & Traces
Portraits and Stories along the State’s Historic Routes
Text by Gary Marx and photographs by Daniel Overturf, with a foreword by Dick Durbin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
WINNER, 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award in “Books, Other”!
FINALIST, 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award in Adult Nonfiction!

Exploring Illinois history through the paths we travel


Illinois Trails & Traces partners the deft writing of Gary Marx with vivid photography by Daniel Overturf to illuminate ever evolving patterns of travel and settlement. Taking the reader on a journey down early buffalo traces and Native American trails, this book shows how these paths evolved into wagon roads and paved highways. Marx and Overturf explore historic routes ranging from Route 66 to the Underground Railroad, all the way back to post-Ice Age animal migration trails followed by Paleo-Indian people. The authors also examine how rivers, canals, and railroads spurred the rapid rise of Illinois as a modern state.

Marx and Overturf bring history into the present by including over forty photographic portraits and written profiles of individuals who live along these routes today. Many of the people you will meet on these pages work to preserve and honor the history of these passages. Others profiled here embody the spirit of the old roads and provide a vivid link between past and present. Through this journey, we discover that we’ve all been traveling the same road all along.
 
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front cover of The Jefferson Highway
The Jefferson Highway
Blazing the Way from Winnepeg to New Orleans
Lyell D. Henry Jr.
University of Iowa Press, 2016
Today American motorists can count on being able to drive to virtually any town or city in the continental United States on a hard surface. That was far from being true in the early twentieth century, when the automobile was new and railroads still dominated long-distance travel. Then, the roads confronting would-be motorists were not merely bad, they were abysmal, generally accounted to be the worst of those of all the industrialized nations.

The plight of the rapidly rising numbers of early motorists soon spawned a “good roads” movement that included many efforts to build and pave long-distance, colorfully named auto trails across the length and breadth of the nation. Full of a can-do optimism, these early partisans of motoring sought to link together existing roads and then make them fit for automobile driving—blazing, marking, grading, draining, bridging, and paving them. The most famous of these named highways was the Lincoln Highway between New York City and San Francisco. By early 1916, a proposed counterpart coursing north and south from Winnipeg to New Orleans had also been laid out.

Called the Jefferson Highway, it eventually followed several routes through Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The Jefferson Highway, the first book on this pioneering road, covers its origin, history, and significance, as well as its eventual fading from most memories following the replacement of names by numbers on long-distance highways after 1926. Saluting one of the most important of the early named highways on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, historian Lyell D. Henry Jr. contributes to the growing literature on the earliest days of road-building and long-distance motoring in the United States. For readers who might also want to drive the original route of the Jefferson Highway, three chapters trace that route through Iowa, pointing out many vintage features of the roadside along the way. The perfect book for a summer road trip! 
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front cover of Justice and the Interstates
Justice and the Interstates
The Racist Truth about Urban Highways
Edited by Ryan Reft, Amanda K. Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca C. Retzlaff
Island Press, 2022
When the U.S. interstate system was constructed, spurred by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, many highways were purposefully routed through Black, Brown, and poor communities. These neighborhoods were destroyed, isolated from the rest of the city, or left to deteriorate over time.
 
Edited by Ryan Reft, Amanda Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca Retzlaff, Justice and the Interstates examines the toll that the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System has taken on vulnerable communities over the past seven decades, details efforts to restore these often- segregated communities, and makes recommendations for moving forward. It opens up new areas for historical inquiry, while also calling on engineers, urban planners, transportation professionals, and policymakers to account for the legacies of their practices.
 
The chapters, written by diverse experts and thought leaders, look at different topics related to justice and the highway system, including:
  • A history of how White supremacists used interstate highway routing in Alabama to disrupt the civil rights movement
  • The impact of the highway in the Bronzeville area of Milwaukee
  • How the East Los Angeles Interchange disrupted Eastside communities and displaced countless Latino households
  • Efforts to restore the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul 
Justice and the Interstates provides a concise but in-depth examination of the damages wrought by highway construction on the nation’s communities of color. Community advocates, transportation planners, engineers, historians, and policymakers will find a way forward to both address this history and reconcile it with current practices.
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front cover of No Place Distant
No Place Distant
Roads And Motorized Recreation On America's Public Lands
David G. Havlick; Foreword by Michael P. Dombeck
Island Press, 2002

While many of the roads on public lands provide a great service with relatively little harm, others create significant problems -- from habitat fragmentation to noise pollution to increased animal mortality -- with little or no benefit.

In No Place Distant, author David Havlick presents for the first time a comprehensive and in-depth examination of the more than 550,000 miles of roads that crisscross our national parks, national forests, Bureau of Land Management lands, and wildlife refuges, considering how they came to be; their ecological, financial, and societal costs; and what can be done to ensure that those roads are as environmentally benign and cost-effective as possible, while remaining functional and accessible. The book:

  • places the profusion of roads on our public lands in historical context
  • offers an overview of the ecological effects of roads
  • explores the policies, politics, and economics that have fostered road-building on public lands
  • considers the contentious topic of motorized recreation
  • examines efforts to remove roads and restore degraded lands to health

Bringing together an impressive range and depth of information along with a thoughtful analysis of the issues, No Place Distant offers a definitive look at the debate over roads on public lands. With its well-crafted prose and extensive documentation, it is an unparalleled resource for anyone concerned with the health or management of public lands in the United States.


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front cover of The Old Federal Road in Alabama
The Old Federal Road in Alabama
An Illustrated Guide
Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher
University of Alabama Press, 2019
A concise illustrated guidebook for those wishing to explore and know more about the storied gateway that made possible Alabama's development
 
Forged through the territory of the Creek Nation by the United States federal government, the Federal Road was developed as a communication artery linking the east coast of the United States with Louisiana. Its creation amplified already tense relationships between the government, settlers, and the Creek Nation, culminating in the devastating Creek War of 1813–1814, and thereafter it became the primary avenue of immigration for thousands of Alabama settlers.

Central to understanding Alabama’s territorial and early statehood years, the Federal Road was both a physical and symbolic thoroughfare that cut a swath of shattering change through the land and cultures it traversed. The road revolutionized Alabama’s expansion, altering the course of its development by playing a significant role in sparking a cataclysmic war, facilitating unprecedented American immigration, and enabling an associated radical transformation of the land itself.

The first half of The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide offers a narrative history that includes brief accounts of the construction of the road, the experiences of historic travelers, and descriptions of major changes to the road over time. The authors vividly reconstruct the course of the road in detail and make use of a wealth of well-chosen illustrations. Along the way they give attention to the very terrain it traversed, bringing to life what traveling the road must have been like and illuminating its story in a way few others have ever attempted.

The second half of the volume is divided into three parts—Eastern, Central, and Southern—and serves as a modern traveler’s guide to the Federal Road. This section includes driving tours and maps, highlighting historical sites and surviving portions of the old road and how to visit them.
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front cover of Our Way Or The Highway
Our Way Or The Highway
Inside The Minnehaha Free State
Mary Losure
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

front cover of The Paris-Lexington Road
The Paris-Lexington Road
Community-Based Planning And Context Sensitive Highway Design
Krista L. Schneider; Landscape Architecture Foundation
Island Press, 2003

Located in the heart of the Kentucky Bluegrass Region, the "Paris Pike" is a scenic, twelve-mile corridor running between Lexington and Paris. Beginning in 1969, the state of Kentucky sought to widen the road in order to improve safety and capacity. Various objections led to a federal court injunction imposed in 1979 that halted the project for more than fifteen years. Over the span of three decades, several consultant studies contributed to the public understanding of the road's significance and set the stage for what has been regarded as the model for context-sensitive road reconstruction in America.

The Paris-Lexington Road focuses on the history of the reconstruction of the Paris Pike (now renamed the "Paris-Lexington Road") to critically review this reconstruction project and illustrate its significance to the profession of landscape architecture. It also situates the role of landscape architects in the history of highway design, and examines the various contemporary challenges and opportunities represented within the Paris Pike project.

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front cover of Rethinking America's Highways
Rethinking America's Highways
A 21st-Century Vision for Better Infrastructure
Robert W. Poole Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Americans spend hours every day sitting in traffic. And the roads they idle on are often rough and potholed, their exits, tunnels, guardrails, and bridges in terrible disrepair. According to transportation expert Robert Poole, this congestion and deterioration are outcomes of the way America provides its highways. Our twentieth-century model overly politicizes highway investment decisions, short-changing maintenance and often investing in projects whose costs exceed their benefits.

In Rethinking America’s Highways, Poole examines how our current model of state-owned highways came about and why it is failing to satisfy its customers. He argues for a new model that treats highways themselves as public utilities—like electricity, telephones, and water supply. If highways were provided commercially, Poole argues, people would pay for highways based on how much they used, and the companies would issue revenue bonds to invest in facilities people were willing to pay for. Arguing for highway investments to be motivated by economic rather than political factors, this book makes a carefully-reasoned and well-documented case for a new approach to highways that is sure to inform future decisions and policies for U.S. infrastructure.
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front cover of Road Ecology
Road Ecology
Science and Solutions
Richard T.T. Forman, Kevin Heanue, Julia Jones, Frederick Swanson, Thomas Turrentine, Thomas C. Winter, Daniel Sperling, John Bissonette, Anthony P. Clevenger, Carol D. Cutshall, Virginia H. Dale, Lenore Fahrig, Robert France, and Charles R. Goldman
Island Press, 2002

A central goal of transportation is the delivery of safe and efficient services with minimal environmental impact. In practice, though, human mobility has flourished while nature has suffered. Awareness of the environmental impacts of roads is increasing, yet information remains scarce for those interested in studying, understanding, or minimizing the ecological effects of roads and vehicles.

Road Ecology addresses that shortcoming by elevating previously localized and fragmented knowledge into a broad and inclusive framework for understanding and developing solutions. The book brings together fourteen leading ecologists and transportation experts to articulate state-of-the-science road ecology principles, and presents specific examples that demonstrate the application of those principles. Diverse theories, concepts, and models in the new field of road ecology are integrated to establish a coherent framework for transportation policy, planning, and projects. Topics examined include:

  • foundations of road ecology
  • roads, vehicles, and transportation planning
  • vegetation and roadsides
  • wildlife populations and mitigation
  • water, sediment, and chemical flows
  • aquatic ecosystems
  • wind, noise, and atmospheric effects
  • road networks and landscape fragmentation
Road Ecology links ecological theories and concepts with transportation planning, engineering, and travel behavior. With more than 100 illustrations and examples from around the world, it is an indispensable and pioneering work for anyone involved with transportation, including practitioners and planners in state and province transportation departments, federal agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. The book also opens up an important new research frontier for ecologists.
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front cover of The Road to Mexico
The Road to Mexico
Lawrence J. Taylor and Maeve Hickey
University of Arizona Press, 1997
The road between Tucson, Arizona, and Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, runs straight and true. Slicing through miles of rolling desert and faraway blue mountains, it could be just another fast way to get from here to there. But if the traveler has a taste for adventure and time to spare, this road can be a rich and unforgettable ride.

Equipped with camera, pen, and a lively curiosity, photographer Maeve Hickey and writer Lawrence J. Taylor set out to capture whatever might come their way on the road to Mexico. They roamed and rambled, they stayed well off the beaten track, and they talked to nearly everyone they met, from wisecracking waitresses to landed gentry to street urchins dressed in rags. Their book brings to life the calf ropers and casinos, the saints and sinners, the mariachis and miracles in a no-man's-land that sometimes seems to belong neither to the United States nor to Mexico.

Following the footsteps of earlier travelers-traders, warriors, missionaries, and explorers-these modern pilgrims take a hands-on approach to their journey. Throughout, both writer and photographer convey the sizzle and spice of a land where Indian, Mexican, and Anglo worlds have collided, coexisted, and melted into each other for centuries. Their eye for the hidden telling detail carries the reader straight into the action, and their zest for excitement spurs any traveler to drop everything, grab a bag, and hit the road to Mexico.
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front cover of Roads in the Wilderness
Roads in the Wilderness
Conflict in Canyon Country
Jedediah S. Rogers
University of Utah Press, 2013

Winner of the Wallace Stegner Prize in American Environmental or Western History

The canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona—a celebrated desert of rock and sand punctuated by gorges and mesas—is a region hotly contested among vying and disparate interests, from industrial developers to wilderness preservation advocates. Roads are central to the conflicts raging in an area perceived as one of the last large roadless places in the continental United States. The canyon country in fact contains an extensive network of dirt trails and roads, many originally constructed under the authority of a one-sentence statute in an 1866 mining law, later known as R.S. 2477. While well-groomed and paved roads came to signify the industrialization of the modern age, twentiethcentury conservationists have regarded roads as intrusive human imprints on the nation’s wild lands. Roads connect rural communities, spur economic growth, and in some cases blend harmoniously into the landscape, but they also fracture and divide, disturb wildlife and habitat, facilitate industrial development, and spoil wilderness.
 
Rogers reflects on the meaning of roads amid environmental conflicts that continue to grip the canyon country. Transporting readers from road controversies like the infamous Burr Trail battle to the contentious web of roads in Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument to off-roading in Arch Canyon, Rogers demonstrates how the conflicts are deeply rooted in history and culture. The first permanent Anglo-American settlers in the region were Mormon pioneers and current views about land and resource use in southern Utah often derive from stories about how those pioneer ancestors defied wilderness to found their communities in the desert. Roads in the Wilderness will be of interest to environmentalists, historians, and those who live in the American West, challenging readers to think about the canyon country and the stories embedded in the land.
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front cover of Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom
Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom
Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism
Jeffrey J. Kripal
University of Chicago Press, 2001
William Blake once wrote that "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Inspired by these poetic terms, Jeffrey J. Kripal reveals how the works of scholars of mysticism are often rooted in their own mystical experiences, "roads of excess," which can both lead to important insights into these scholars' works and point us to our own "palaces of wisdom."

In his new book, Kripal addresses the twentieth-century study of mysticism as a kind of mystical tradition in its own right, with its own unique histories, discourses, sociological dynamics, and rhetorics of secrecy. Fluidly combining autobiography and biography with scholarly exploration, Kripal takes us on a tour of comparative mystical thought by examining the lives and works of five major historians of mysticism—Evelyn Underhill, Louis Massignon, R. C. Zaehner, Agehananda Bharati, and Elliot Wolfson—as well as relating his own mystical experiences. The result, Kripal finds, is seven "palaces of wisdom": the religious power of excess, the necessity of distance in the study of mysticism, the relationship between the mystical and art, the dilemmas of male subjectivity and modern heterosexuality, a call for ethical criticism, the paradox of the insider-outsider problem in the study of religion, and the magical power of texts and their interpretation.

An original and penetrating analysis of modern scholarship and scholars of mysticism, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom is also a persuasive demonstration of the way this scholarly activity is itself a mystical phenomenon.
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front cover of Roads of Home
Roads of Home
Beck, Henry
Rutgers University Press, 1983
"None of this is orderly, store-bought legend or folklore. This is the way people talk, sought out and recorded by one who loves both the people and the talk."--The New York Times

Long regarded as folklife classics, Henry Charlton Beck's books are vivid recreations of the back roads, small towns, and legends that give New Jersey its special character. Father Henry Charlton Beck, who lived in New Jersey nearly all his life, was the author of numerous books on New Jersey folklife, state editor of the Camden Courier-Post, and writer for the Newark Star-Ledger. He is considered New Jersey's first folklorist and his painstaking work has left us with a rich collection of tales.
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front cover of The Roads of My Relations
The Roads of My Relations
Devon A. Mihesuah
University of Arizona Press, 2001

"I've traveled a lot of roads, but never alone. My relations are with me," says Billie McKenney, one of the matriarchs of the complex family of Choctaws searching for peace as the white world rapidly encroaches on their tribal land, politics, and values. In her first collection of stories, Native American writer Devon A. Mihesuah chronicles the lives of several generations of a close-knit Choctaw family as they are forced from their traditional homeland in nineteenth-century Mississippi and endure unspeakable sorrows during their journey before settling in southeastern Oklahoma.

Blending family lore, stark realism, and vivid imagination, The Roads of My Relations relays a strong sense of Choctaw culture and world view in absorbing tales of history and legend. Unfolding through the voices and actions of family members, confused half-bloods, and unlikely heroes—not all of them living or even human—the stories tell of the horrors of forced removal, the turbulence of post Civil War Indian Territory, the terrifying violence suffered at the hands of immortal Crow witches, and the family's ultimate survival against forces of evil. Time-traveling ghosts, mysterious medicine men, and eerie shape-shifters share the pages with proud matriarchs, mischievous schoolgirls, and loving siblings.

Together, these interwoven stories express the strength and persistence of a tribe whose identity and pride have survived the disruptions of colonialism. With The Roads of My Relations, Devon A. Mihesuah has created a universal and timeless exploration of heritage, spirituality, and the importance of preserving and passing on tradition.


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Roads, Runways and Resistance
From the Newbury Bypass to Extinction Rebellion
Steve Melia
Pluto Press, 2021
From the anti-roads protests of the 1990s to HS2 and Extinction Rebellion, conflict and protest have shaped the politics of transport. In 1989, Margaret Thatcher's government announced 'the biggest road-building programme since the Romans.' This is the inside story of the thirty tumultuous years that have followed. Roads, Runways and Resistance draws on over 50 interviews with government ministers, advisors and protestors - many of whom, including 'Swampy', speak here for the first time about the events they describe. It is a story of transport ministers undermined by their own Prime Ministers, protestors attacked or quietly supported by the police, and smartly-dressed protestors who found a way onto the roof of the Houses of Parliament. Today, as a new wave of road building and airport expansion threatens to bust Britain's carbon budgets, climate change protestors find themselves on a collision course with the government. Melia asks, what difference did the protests of the past make? And what impacts might today's protest movements have on the transport of the future?
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Roads to Dystopia
Sociological Essays on the Postmodern Condition
Stanford Lyman
University of Arkansas Press, 2001
If the postmodern condition is a dystopia characterized by alienation and despair, argues distinguished sociologist Stanford Lyman, postmodern epistemologies compound the problem by denigrating Enlightenment philosophies that still offer agency and hope to those who struggle to be free. In this, his sixth volume in the Studies in American Sociology series, Lyman examines this contradiction as it has shaped American discourses on race and community, asking why Gunnar Myrdal's "American Dilemma" is still unresolved; how Chinese workers have fared in the labor movement and in labor history; what searches for "the lost tribes of Israel" have meant socially and historically; how cinema has offered metaphors for social action but presented failed utopias on screen; and how we have not yet established a basic definition of "the good life." In each of these instances, Lyman seeks new routes in the quest for justice.
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Roads to Power
Britain Invents the Infrastructure State
Jo Guldi
Harvard University Press, 2012

Roads to Power tells the story of how Britain built the first nation connected by infrastructure, how a libertarian revolution destroyed a national economy, and how technology caused strangers to stop speaking.

In early eighteenth-century Britain, nothing but dirt track ran between most towns. By 1848 the primitive roads were transformed into a network of highways connecting every village and island in the nation—and also dividing them in unforeseen ways. The highway network led to contests for control over everything from road management to market access. Peripheries like the Highlands demanded that centralized government pay for roads they could not afford, while English counties wanted to be spared the cost of underwriting roads to Scotland. The new network also transformed social relationships. Although travelers moved along the same routes, they occupied increasingly isolated spheres. The roads were the product of a new form of government, the infrastructure state, marked by the unprecedented control bureaucrats wielded over decisions relating to everyday life.

Does information really work to unite strangers? Do markets unite nations and peoples in common interests? There are lessons here for all who would end poverty or design their markets around the principle of participation. Guldi draws direct connections between traditional infrastructure and the contemporary collapse of the American Rust Belt, the decline of American infrastructure, the digital divide, and net neutrality. In the modern world, infrastructure is our principal tool for forging new communities, but it cannot outlast the control of governance by visionaries.

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Roads to Reason
Transportation Administration and Rationality in Colombia
Richard E. Hartwig
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983
Hartwig views the Columbian Ministry of Public Works, applying a theoretical model of rationality and responsibility to view how policy failures were caused by faulty definitions of problems and mistaken approaches in building Andean Highways from 1922-1974. This book will interest those involved in policy administration, organization theory, and policy planning in both developed and developing countries.
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Roads to Renewal
The Report of Activities and Accomplishments of the Civil Works Administration in Michigan, November 1933–March 1934
James R. Anderson
Michigan State University Press, 2020
This publication makes available to historians and general readers a little-known document mapping the achievement of a crucial initiative in the plans for recovery from the harshest blows of the Great Depression, in one of America’s hardest-hit states. It presents a historically unique case history of the Federal Civil Works Administration, established by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The CWA addressed the issues of unemployment and destitution brought on by the Depression, specifically in Michigan. With a contextualizing introduction and afterword by historian James R. Anderson, the republication of this report—with its wealth of data and statistics, and its compelling information about the extent of the crisis and of the government’s initiatives—brings to light fascinating aspects of how critical (and impactful) such interventions were in the context of unprecedented economic challenges.
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Roads to Rome
A Guide to Notable Converts from Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to the
John Beaumont
St. Augustine's Press, 2010

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Roads Were Not Built for Cars
How cyclists were the first to push for good roads & became the pioneers of motoring
Carlton Reid
Island Press, 2015
In Roads Were Not Built for Cars, Carlton Reid reveals the pivotal—and largely unrecognized—role that bicyclists played in the development of modern roadways. Reid introduces readers to cycling personalities, such as Henry Ford, and the cycling advocacy groups that influenced early road improvements, literally paving the way for the motor car. When the bicycle morphed from the vehicle of rich transport progressives in the 1890s to the “poor man’s transport” in the 1920s, some cyclists became ardent motorists and were all too happy to forget their cycling roots. But, Reid explains, many motor pioneers continued cycling, celebrating the shared links between transport modes that are now seen as worlds apart. In this engaging and meticulously researched book, Carlton Reid encourages us all to celebrate those links once again.
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Roads, Where There Are No Roads
A Novel
Angela Jackson
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Winner, 2018 John Gardner Fiction prize

In this highly anticipated sequel to her acclaimed first novel, Where I Must Go, Angela Jackson continues the remarkable story of Magdalena Grace. As a black student at the predominantly white Eden University, Maggie found herself deeply involved in conflict. Now, out in the wider world, she and her beloved Treemont Stone evolve into agents of change as they become immersed in the historical events unfolding around them—the movements advocating for civil rights, black consciousness, black feminism, the rights of the poor, and an end to the war in Vietnam. Rendered in prose so lyrical and luminous as to suggest a dream, Roads, Where There Are No Roads is a love story in the greatest sense, celebrating love between a man and a woman, between family members, and among the members of a community whose pride pushes them to rise up and resist. This gorgeously written novel will resonate with readers today as incredibly relevant, uplifting hearts and causing eyes to water with sorrow and delight. 
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Safe Passages
Highways, Wildlife, and Habitat Connectivity
Edited by Jon P. Beckmann, Anthony P. Clevenger, Marcel P. Huijser, Jodi A. Hilty
Island Press, 2010
Safe Passages brings together in a single volume the latest information on the emerging science of road ecology as it relates to mitigating interactions between roads and wildlife. This practical handbook of tools and examples is designed to assist individuals and organizations thinking about or working toward reducing road-wildlife impacts. The book provides:
  • an overview of the importance of habitat connectivity with regard to roads
  • current planning approaches and technologies for mitigating the impacts of highways on both terrestrial and aquatic species
  • different facets of public participation in highway-wildlife connectivity mitigation projects
  • case studies from partnerships across North America that highlight successful on-the-ground implementation of ecological and engineering solutions
  • recent innovative highway-wildlife mitigation developments
Detailed case studies span a range of scales, from site-specific wildlife crossing structures, to statewide planning for habitat connectivity, to national legislation. Contributors explore the cooperative efforts that are emerging as a result of diverse organizations—including transportation agencies, land and wildlife management agencies, and nongovernmental organizations—finding common ground to tackle important road ecology issues and problems.
 
Safe Passages is an important new resource for local-, state-, and national-level managers and policymakers working on road-wildlife issues, and will appeal to a broad audience including scientists, agency personnel, planners, land managers, transportation consultants, students, conservation organizations, policymakers, and citizens engaged in road-wildlife mitigation projects.
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Snake's Daughter
The Roads in and out of War
Gail Hosking Gilberg
University of Iowa Press, 1997

Gail Hosking Gilberg's father was a hero, a valiant soldier decorated posthumously with the Medal of Honor, a man who served his country throughout his entire adult life. But Charles Hosking was a mystery to his daughter. He was killed in Vietnam a week after her seventeenth birthday. She buried the war, the protests, the medal, and her military upbringing along with her father, so much so that she felt cut off from herself. It took more than twenty years for her to recognize the stirrings of a father and a daughter not yet at peace.

Gilberg began a journey—two journeys really—to find out who her father was and in the process to find herself. She explored her buried rage, shame, and silence, and examined how war had shaped her life. In studying the photo albums that her father had left behind, Gilberg found that the photographs demanded that she give voice to her feelings, then release her silent words, words that had no meaning in war for her father yet had all the meaning in the world for her. The result was an epiphany. The photographs became the roads she took in and out of war, and her words brought her father home. Snake's Daughter reveals the crossroads where a soldier father's life and a daughter's life connect.

Snake's Daughter is an arresting and anguished narrative that gives voice to an experience Gail Hosking Gilberg shares with thousands of Americans, including military “brats” whose parents served their country and often gave their lives in the process.

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The World beyond the Windshield
Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe
Christof Mauch
Ohio University Press, 2008

For better or worse, the view through a car’s windshield has redefined how we see the world around us. In some cases, such as the American parkway, the view from the road was the be-all and end-all of the highway; in others, such as the Italian autostrada, the view of a fast, efficient transportation machine celebrating either Fascism or its absence was the goal. These varied environments are neither necessary nor accidental but the outcomes of historical negotiations, and whether we abhor them or take delight in them, they have become part of the fabric of human existence.

The World beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe is the first systematic, comparative look at these landscapes. By looking at examples from the United States and Europe, the chapters in this volume explore the relationship between the road and the landscape thatit traverses, cuts through, defines, despoils, and enhances. The authors analyze the Washington Beltway and the Blue Ridge Parkway, as well as iconic roads in Italy, Nazi Germany, East Germany, and Great Britain. This is a story of the transatlantic exchange of ideas about environment and technology and of the national and nationalistic appropriations of such landscaping.

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