Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in the Modern American Road Story, 1893–1921 Ambivalence and Aspiration

This book examines travel narratives as a medium used by the American public to imagine and negotiate new ways to live in, move through, and share national space. Setting an array of archival material, including congressional deliberations, into analytical conversation with road stories by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Upton Sinclair, Emily Post, Zitkala-Ša, Henry Ford and many others, this book reframes our understanding of the origins of American automobility. The evidence gathered here sheds light on the processes by which the defining social infrastructure of the twentieth century came to be enacted, and also exposes the fraught debates and abiding misgivings that continue to roil infrastructure planning today. The insights captured in this study purposefully deepen our attention to questions of land use and collective responsibility at a moment when the ecological and social-justice consequences of American automobility must be thoroughly re-evaluated so that more conscientious mobility futures may be developed.

1. Pologue: The Cultural Terrain of America's Modern Road Landscape.- 2. Storied Road: Ambivalence in the Land of American Automobility.- 3. Control and Consent: Contested Sovereignty on America’s Country Roads.- 4. Cynicism and Progress: Gullible Devotion to the Prospect of National Automobility.- 5. Trailblazing Modernity: Mapping the Compromises of Mass Mobility.- 6. Into the Great Escapism: Vacationing Vagabonds Getting Nowhere Fast.- 7. The Freedom of Conscription: Tramps Outcast on the Road.- 8. Epilogue: The Same Old Story of the American Road.

Andrew Vogel is the Honors Program Director and a Professor of English at Kutztown State University of Pennsylvania, where he listens, teaches, and walks the hills in the original homelands of the Lenape peoples.