The Highway Revolution, 1895-1925: How the United States Got Out of the Mud

摘要

The Highway Revolution is, at least in small part, family history. I. B. Holley Jr.'s father was a highway contractor in Connecticut and New York State during the early twentieth century, and a discovery of a cache of his father's business papers led him to a deeper exploration of the history of road building in the United States. Over the past quarter century, scholars have developed a rich understanding of twentieth-century transportation politics, but Holley offers something different. This text is a "muddy-boots view" of road building "at the tactical level," and it is an account that reflects the lived experience of the small-scale highway contractors who played a decisive role in the hard-surfacing of the nation's dirt roads (p. vii).