Synopses & Reviews
For most residents of the United States, getting almost anywhere begins with reaching for the car keys. This is true, Christopher Wells argues, because the United States is car country: a nation whose landscapes are so completely oriented around personal vehicles that other forms of transportation tend to be inconvenient at best and nearly impossible at worst.
Car-dependent landscapes seem perfectly natural to us today, but they are a relatively new historical development. In Car Country, Wells explains how, over the course of just a few decades, entrepreneurs demonstrated the profitability, practicality, and political attractiveness of remaking the nation around the easy movement of automobiles. He also shows how government policies, from the federal to the local, created a dense thicket of new regulations, incentives, and practices surrounding both transportation and land use, which together redefined "development" as "car-oriented development."
From the dawn of the motor age to the establishment of the interstate highway system and the rise of the suburbs, Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, charting a history essential for understanding American transportation and land-use issues today.
Christopher Wells is associate professor of environmental history at Macalester College.
"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
Review
"One of the great strengths of the book is Wells's meticulous work in revealing how the institutional, economic, and mental arrangements supporting Car Country were set in place during the interwar years... aside, Wells's book is a remarkable achievement." -Theodore Strathman, Southern California Quarterly
Review
"Through an impressive use of primary and secondary materials along with a lucid narrative style, Christopher Wells successfully describes and analyzes the complex interactions of widespread automobile ownership and the ubiquity of suburban life." -Rudi Volti, Environmental History, January 2014
Review
"[F]or students and inhabitants of car country, Wells offers a terrific excavation of the sprawlscape that still drives our days." -Virginia Scharff, Human Ecology, November 2013
Review
"[T]he book is a fresh, well-documented history of roadbuilding policies in the United States between 1900 and 1960." -James M. Rubenstein, Journal of American History, March 2014
Review
"Relatively few academic geographers have focused their research and publishing directly on the automobile and its geographical implications for life in the United States. Yet nothing over the past century has had a greater effect on America's geography than the public's evolving dependence on the motor car, and, as well, the motor truck. . . . Christopher Wells's opus will excite more geographers to focus on automobility as a fundamental factor underlying the American experience." -John A. Jackle, The AAG Review of Books, February 2014
Review
"In Car Country, Christopher W. Wells offers a compelling history of America's signature car-dependent landscapes. With lively anecdotes, effective imagery, and dozens of illustrations, the book also presents an accessible narrative that will help students visualize how Americans gradually and profoundly transformed their nation." -Michael R. Fine, American Historical Review, February 2014
Review
"Wells has produced an important and persuasive new chapter in the history of American car culture." -David Blanke, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Autumn 2013
Synopsis
For most people in the United States, going almost anywhere begins with reaching for the car keys. This is true, Christopher Wells argues, because the United States is Car Country-a nation dominated by landscapes that are difficult, inconvenient, and often even unsafe to navigate by those who are not sitting behind the wheel of a car.
The prevalence of car-dependent landscapes seems perfectly natural to us today, but it is, in fact, a relatively new historical development. In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes readers on a lively tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that new transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles.
From the dawn of the motor age to the establishment of the Interstate Highway System and the rise of the suburbs, Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing readers to see the everyday world in a completely new way. The result is a history that is essential for understanding American transportation and land-use issues today.
Christopher W. Wells is associate professor of environmental history at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
"Wells seeks in this lively, playful, and wonderfully accessible account to introduce readers to the transformations wrought upon the national landscape of the United States to make it fit for Americans and their cars. . . . To grasp the complexities and fascinations and paradoxes of Car Country, I know of no better guide than this engaging book."--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