{"title":"The Road And American Culture","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"national-road-book-karl-b-raitz-9780801851551","title":"The National Road","description":"This volume provides an overview of the building of the National Road, a project that shaped the geography and history of the US by uniting east and west, and ultimately dividing north and south. It describes the origins, evolution, and meaning of the National Road for American culture, economics, and patterns of settlement. The text argues that, because of the emerging technology of the railroad, the National Road was obsolete from the time it was built; and in addition, it argues that it was also premature, because the technology necessary for making efficient use of an improved road network was nearly a century away.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49629006463249,"sku":"GOR013429909","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51686784598289,"sku":"CIN0801851556G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52327827800337,"sku":"CIN0801851556VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801851556.jpg?v=1750849448"},{"product_id":"fast-food-book-john-a-jakle-9780801861093","title":"Fast Food","description":"Eating on the run in America has a long history, but it was the automobile that accelerated quick service and created a whole new category of food. The rise of car culture brought an explosion of roadside restaurants which served sandwiches and fried foods meant to be consumed quickly and easily, usually with the fingers: hot dogs, fried chicken and the pre-eminent roadside food, hamburgers with french fries. In this work, the authors contemplate the origins, architecture and commercial growth of wayside eateries in the USA over the 20th century. Written in the same style as their two previous texts, \"The Gas Station in America\" and \"The Motel in America\", the volume examines the impact of the automobile on the restaurant business and offers a thorough account of roadside dining. Jakle and Sculle begin with the antebellum era, when restaurants came into their own in the United States, and trace the evolution from coffee shops, main street cafes and diners, to drive-ins and drive-throughs. Focusing on the people who created and ran these enterprises, the autors describe the rise of early franchises such as White Castle and White Tower and the later dominance of large corporations such as Burger King, Hardee's and McDonald's. The authors argue that the story of these unpretentious eating places is the story of modern American culture. At first, one-storey, wood-frame sheds were modelled on stalls at carnivals and amusement parks, where many foods that were once novelties but are now basic to the American diet - such as the hamburger and the hot dog - were popularized. Architectural experimentation was a hallmark of the late 1920s and early 1930s, with stands built as giant oranges, lemons, milk cans, inverted ice cream cones and milk cartons. By the 1950s, drive-ins and diners had become the icons of a generational subculture, places where teenagers sought freedom from parental surveillance and adult authority. In the late 20th century, the roadside restaurant (like the gas station and motel, according to Jakle and Sculle) is an essential part of the modern American landscape - where intentionally designed sameness \"welcomes\" every interstate driver.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49926891569425,"sku":"CIN0801861098G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51721351594257,"sku":"CIN0801861098VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801861098.jpg?v=1750882591"},{"product_id":"guide-to-the-national-road-book-karl-b-raitz-9780801851568","title":"A Guide to the National Road","description":"This companion volume to \"The National Road\" is a guide to America's first federally-funded highway. It combines geographical and historical information to take readers on a 700-mile journey through America's heartland, from the Chesapeake Bay to the Mississippi River. There are chapter-length vignettes on each of the road's seven segments, and the road is traced through landmark Maryland towns such as New Market and Frederick, before it passes, further west, Fort Necessity Battlefield in Pennsylvania. This guide leads readers down a trail blazed by Native American hunting parties and settlers' conestoga wagons, mounted cavalry and model-T Fords, and shows how the National Road offers the serious traveller a rich and rewarding experience.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49994622435601,"sku":"CIN0801851564G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50655107711249,"sku":"CIN0801851564VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51330757591313,"sku":"CIN0801851564A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801851564.jpg?v=1750914580"},{"product_id":"fast-food-book-john-a-jakle-9780801869204","title":"Fast Food","description":"Eating on the run has a long history in America, but it was the automobile that created a whole new category of dining: \"fast food.\" In the final volume of their \"Gas, Food, Lodging\" trilogy, John Jakle and Keith Sculle contemplate the origins, architecture, and commercial growth of fast food restaurants from White Castle to McDonald's. Illustrated with 217 maps, postcards, photographs and drawings, \"Fast Food\" makes clear that the story of these unpretentious restaurants is the story of modern American culture. The first roadside eateries popularized once-unfamiliar foods - hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, milkshakes, burritos - that are now basic to the American diet. By the 1950s, drive-ins and diners had become icons of rebellion where teenagers sought freedom from adult authority. Like the gas station and the motel, the roadside restaurant is an essential part of the modern American landscape - where intentional sameness of design \"welcomes\" every interstate driver.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50125378683153,"sku":"CIN080186920XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363373191441,"sku":"CIN080186920XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53495353147665,"sku":"CIN080186920XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/080186920X.jpg?v=1751170375"},{"product_id":"fifty-houses-book-sandy-sorlien-9780801870620","title":"Fifty Houses","description":"In 1988, photographer Sandy Sorlien set out on a series of journeys to document the rich architectural heritage that America is losing to the cheap and banal design aesthetic of tract housing, strip malls, and big-box stores. Her seven-year odyssey took her over 90,000 miles of back roads to every state in the Union in search of homes that reflect and define the region in which they stand. After making over a thousand \"house portraits\", Sorlien has chosen one representative image from each state and collected them in this volume. Shot with black-and-white infrared film, the homes captured through Sorlien's lens range from the grand to the humble, from the historic to the commonplace. Included here are a classic saltbox in Newtown, Connecticut; the House on the Rocks in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay; a mobile home in Bushnell, Florida; a Stick-style folk Victorian in Biloxi, Mississippi; a limestone cottage in Fredericksburg, Texas; a false-front house in Rollins, Montana; a log cabin in Dubois, Wyoming; an adobe dwelling in Sante Fe, New Mexico; and a platform tent in Healy, Alaska. Each image is accompanied by a vignette from Sorlien's road journal, offering details of the house depicted, its owners and history, other houses in the region, or her travel experiences in the state. At a time when America's architectural landscape is being homogenized by suburban sprawl, when the outskirts of Anchorage and Oklahoma City look no different from those of Tucson, Jacksonville, and Salt Lake City, this is both a visual record of regional domestic architecture and an elegiac meditation on the changing American landscape.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50367556616465,"sku":"CIN0801870623G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50367559074065,"sku":"CIN0801870623VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801870623.jpg?v=1750946023"},{"product_id":"motel-in-america-book-john-a-jakle-9780801869181","title":"The Motel in America","description":"Authors John Jakle, Keith Sculle, and Jefferson Rogers take an informative, entertaining and comprehensive look at the history of the motel. From the introduction of roadside tent camps and motor cabins in the 1910s to the kitschy motels of the 1950s that line older roads, and today's comfortable but anonymous chains that lure drivers off the interstate, Americans and their cars have found places to stay on their travels. Motels were more than just places to sleep, however. They were the places where many Americans saw their first colour television, used their first coffee maker, and walked on their first shagpile carpet. Illustrated with more than 230 photographs, postcards, maps and drawings, the book details the development of the motel as a commercial enterprise, its imaginative architectural expressions and its evolution within the place-product-packaging concept along America's highways.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50837293990161,"sku":"GOR014091757","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51423554306321,"sku":"CIN0801869188G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801869188.jpg?v=1751011479"},{"product_id":"motel-in-america-book-john-a-jakle-9780801853838","title":"The Motel in America","description":"An informative look at the history, architecture, business and growth of motels in the US. This book considers what happened to American culture as its citizens became motorists. If automobiles were private containers of movement, the authors argue, motels became places for pause - equally private, equally public. As they developed as commercial enterprises, took form as architectural expression, and evolved within the place-product-packaging concept along America's highways, motels also molded Americans ideas about residence and home. Travelers' rejection of hotels, located in congested downtown areas and lacking adequate parking, prompted the rapid rise of roadside lodging outside the city limits - cabin courts, cottage courts, motor courts, motor inns and eventually highway hotels. By whatever name, motels rapidly increased in number through the 1930s, and then again in the two decades after World War II, reaching their peak in the early 1960s, when about 61,000 motels operated in the US. In 1962, fewer than 2 per cent of all motel establishments were affiliated with franchise lodging chains. 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