Main Street to Miracle Mile - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Main Street to Miracle Mile write by Chester Liebs. This book was released on 1995-08. Main Street to Miracle Mile available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "Traces the transformation of commercial development as it has moved from centralized main streets, out along the street car lines, to form the "miracle miles" and shopping malls of today ... Also explores the evolution of roadside buildings."--Back cover.
Modernizing Main Street
Modernizing Main Street - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Modernizing Main Street write by Gabrielle Esperdy. This book was released on 2010-07-15. Modernizing Main Street available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. An important part of the New Deal, the Modernization Credit Plan helped transform urban business districts and small-town commercial strips across 1930s America, but it has since been almost completely forgotten. In Modernizing Main Street, Gabrielle Esperdy uncovers the cultural history of the hundreds of thousands of modernized storefronts that resulted from the little-known federal provision that made billions of dollars available to shop owners who wanted to update their facades. Esperdy argues that these updated storefronts served a range of complex purposes, such as stimulating public consumption, extending the New Deal’s influence, reviving a stagnant construction industry, and introducing European modernist design to the everyday landscape. She goes on to show that these diverse roles are inseparable, woven together not only by the crisis of the Depression, but also by the pressures of bourgeoning consumerism. As the decade’s two major cultural forces, Esperdy concludes, consumerism and the Depression transformed the storefront from a seemingly insignificant element of the built environment into a potent site for the physical and rhetorical staging of recovery and progress.
Route 66
Route 66 - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Route 66 write by Susan Croce Kelly. This book was released on 1990. Route 66 available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. U.S. Highway 66 was always different from other roads. During the decades it served American travelers, Route 66 became the subject of a world-famous novel, an Oscar-winning film, a hit song, and a long running television program. The 2,000 mile concrete slab also became a seven-year obsession for Susan Croce Kelly and Quinta Scott. They traveled Route 66, photographing buildings, knocking on doors, and interviewing the people who had built the buildings and run the businesses along the highway. Drawing on the oral tradition of those rural Americans who populated the edge of old Route 66, Scott and Kelly have pieced together the story of a highway that was conceived in Tulsa, Oklahoma; linked Chicago to Los Angeles; and played a role in the great social changes of the early twentieth century. Using the words of the people themselves and documents they left behind, Kelly describes the life changes of Route 66 from the dirt-and-gravel days until the time when new technology and different life-styles decreed that it be abandoned to the small towns it had nurtured over the course of thirty years. Scott's photographic essay shows the faces of those 66 people and gives a feeling of what can be seen along the old highway today, from the seminal highway architecture to the grainfields of the Illinois prairie, the windbent trees of western Oklahoma, the emptiness of New Mexico, and the bustling pier where the highway ends on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Route 66 uses oral history and photography as the basis for a human study of this country's most famous road. Historic times, dates, places, and events are described in the words of men and women who were there: driving the highway, cooking hamburgers, creating pottery, and pumping gas. As much as the concrete, gravel, and tar spread in a sweeping arc from Chicago to Santa Monica, those people are Route 66. Their stories and portraits are the biography of the highway.
History along the Way
History along the Way - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook History along the Way write by Dan K. Utley. This book was released on 2013-01-11. History along the Way available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Texans love stories, and the 15,000 roadside markers along the state’s highways and byways testify to the abundance of tales to tell. History along the Way recounts the narratives behind and beyond more than one hundred Texas roadside markers. Peopled with colorful characters—a national leader of Camp Fire Girls, an army engineer who mapped the Republic of Texas frontier, a hunter of mammoth bones, a ragtime composer, civil rights leaders, and an iconic rock star, among others—the book gives readers an intriguing and expanded look at the details, challenges, and lives commemorated by the words cast in metal on these wayside markers scattered across the Lone Star landscape. Also recounted in History along the Way are the stories of historic structures (from roadside architecture and elaborate West Texas hotels to university Old Mains and country schoolhouses of Gillespie County), engineering features (the Hidalgo Pumphouse in South Texas and the Rainbow Bridge in East Texas), and even town mascots (a jackrabbit, a mule, and a prairie dog). Accompanied by helpful maps, colorful photographs, and informative sidebars, History along the Way is guaranteed to inform, amuse, and intrigue. Every part of Texas gets a visit in this anthology of select sites, making it easy for travelers—both the armchair and touring varieties—to enjoy and learn about the fascinating nooks and crannies of history captured in all their variety by the roadside markers of Texas.
The Automobile Age
The Automobile Age - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Automobile Age write by James J. Flink. This book was released on 1990-07-19. The Automobile Age available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In this sweeping cultural history, James Flink provides a fascinating account of the creation of the world's first automobile culture. He offers both a critical survey of the development of automotive technology and the automotive industry and an analysis of the social effects of "automobility" on workers and consumers.
