Promotional Information

Untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, charting a history essential for understanding American transportation and land-use issues today

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 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." from the Foreword by William Cronon "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 "Car Country is the most comprehensive recent synthesis of the automobile in twentieth-century America, of unusual scope and readability." Peter D. Norton, author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City