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Car Country
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Car Country is arguably the most carefully researched, clearly written, and consistently engaging study anyone has yet written exploring the far-flung and extraordinarily complicated landscapes created by and for automobiles in the twentieth-century United States. The story is all the more remarkable because most of us who now inhabit this landscape take it so much for granted without having the slightest clue how it came into being. -- William Cronon, from the Foreword Car Country offers a valuable historical perspective that is directly related to many pressing contemporary issues. -- Owen D. Gutfreund, author of Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape

Table of Contents

Foreword by William Cronon
Acknowledgments
Prologue: A Car of One’s Own

Part One | Before the Automobile, 1880-1905
1. Roads and Reformers

Part Two | Dawn of the Motor Age, 1895-1919
2. Automotive Pioneers
3. Building for Traffic
Photo Gallery One

Part Three | Creating Car Country, 1919-1941
4. Motor-Age Geography
5. Fueling the Boom
6. The Paths Out of Town
Photo Gallery Two

Part Four | New Patterns, New Standards, New Landscapes, 1940-1960
7. Suburban Nation

Epilogue | Reaching for the Car Keys
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Christopher W. Wells is associate professor of environmental history at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Reviews

Car Country is a valuable addition to our knowledge on urban development, the environmental impact of automobiles, and the evolution of the twentieth-century American landscape. For students and inhabitants of car country, Wells offers a terrific excavation of the sprawlscape that still drives our days. One of the great strengths of the book is Wells's meticulous work in revealing how the institutional, economic, and mental arrangements supporting 'Car Country' were set in place during the interwar years... Wells's book is a remarkable achievement. A fresh, well-documented history of roadbuilding policies in the United States between 1900 and 1960. Relatively few academic geographers have focused their research and publishing directly on the automobile and its geographical implications for life in the United States. Yet nothing over the past century has had a greater effect on America's geography than the public's evolving dependence on the motor car, and, as well, the motor truck... Christopher Wells's opus will excite more geographers to focus on automobility as a fundamental factor underlying the American experience. In Car Country, Christopher W. Wells offers a compelling history of America's signature car-dependent landscapes. With lively anecdotes, effective imagery, and dozens of illustrations, the book also presents an accessible narrative that will help students visualize how Americans gradually and profoundly transformed their nation In Car Country, Christopher W. Wells offers a compelling history of America's signature car-dependent landscapes. The text is at once a deft synthesis of recent literature on motor vehicles, highways, urban planning, suburban development, and land use policy, and a persuasive reinterpretation of these histories through the lens of landscape ecology. [T]he book is a fresh, well-documented history of roadbuilding policies in the United States between 1900 and 1960.

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