U.S. Department of Transportation
Federal Highway Administration
1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20590
202-366-4000


Skip to content U.S. Department of Transportation/Federal Highway AdministrationU.S. Department of Transportation/Federal Highway Administration

Highway History

 

Highway History Bibliography

Interstate System, critical

Interstate System
Interstate System, critical
Routes
National Road/U.S. 40
U.S. Route 66
General and Travel
Magazine Articles
The American Guide Series
The American Trail Series
Early American Roads and Turnpikes
Recent Publications
State Highway Histories
Ph.D. Theses
Latest Additions

The latest additions are in bold

Gottfreund, Owen D., 20th-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape, Oxford University Press, 2004. (Takes an historical approach to argue that the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 "undercharged motorists by a wide margin, penalizing the nonmotoring majority while simultaneously inducing more and more Americans to adopt the automobile as the preferred mode of transport" and "consistently favored construction in unpopulated areas while impeding investments in urban transportation networks." He illustrates these themes with chapters on Denver, Colorado; Middlebury, Vermont; and Smyrna, Tennessee.)

Leavitt, Helen, Superhighway-Superhoax, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1970. (A dust jacket blurb conveyed the theme: "From Sea to Shining Sea: we are strangling in a concrete straitjacket that pollutes the environment and makes driving a nightmare." The classic early 1970's diatribe on the subject.)

Kelley, Ben, The Pavers and the Paved, Donald W. Brown, Inc., 1971.

Mowbray, A. Q., Road to Ruin, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1969.

Paull, E. Evans, Stop the Road: Stories from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars, Boyle & Dalton, 2022. (Get to know the Baltimore residents who fought planned expressways in the 1960s and 1970s, with great success and some failures, such as the city’s “Highway to Nowhere.”)

Updated: 11/29/2022
Federal Highway Administration | 1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE | Washington, DC 20590 | 202-366-4000