num_pages: 384
description: A man-made wonder a connective network an economic force a bringer of blight and sprawl and the possibility of escapethe 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 workyears before President Eisenhower knew the plans existedto 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.
language: English
title: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt