Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in the Modern American Road Story, 1893–1921

This book examines travel narratives as a medium used by the American public to imagine and negotiate new ways to live in, move through, and share national space. Setting an array of archival material, including congressional deliberations, into analytical conversation with road stories by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Upton Sinclair, Emily Post, Zitkala-Ša, Henry Ford and many others, this book reframes our understanding of the origins of American automobility. The evidence gathered here sheds light on the processes by which the defining social infrastructure of the twentieth century came to be enacted, and also exposes the fraught debates and abiding misgivings that continue to roil infrastructure planning today. The insights captured in this study purposefully deepen our attention to questions of land use and collective responsibility at a moment when the ecological and social-justice consequences of American automobility must be thoroughly re-evaluated so that more conscientious mobility futures may be developed.

“In this important new study of early automobility, Andrew Vogel reveals the many different forms of work that led to improvements to the American road between 1893 and 1921. This excellent book traces the enthusiasm and ambivalence surrounding proposals to improve roads, revealing them to be complex cultural and political achievements, as well as material landscapes shaped by conscripted labour, including that of many homeless men.” (Peter Merriman, Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography, Aberystwyth University, UK)

“Stories about roads have always been stories about who we are and where we may go. Combining mobility studies’ theoretical richness with a literary scholar’s ears and a historian’s trove of archival evidence, Andrew Vogel reveals the ambivalence with which powerful actors viewed the installation of automobility on the US landscape. Vogel’s recovery of this ambivalence aids us in the crucial work before us as a nation: composing new stories in which the car is no longer the main character.” (Cotten Seiler, Professor of American Studies at Dickinson College, USA and author of Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of American Automobility)

“Vogel provides excellent insights on often overlooked historical events and debates that shaped the American road narrative.  He also looks back and ahead at how problems of infrastructure and the landscape will continue to be crucial.  Vogel's research is brilliant.” (Ronald Primeau, Emeritus Professor of English at Central Michigan University, USA and the former director of the Masters of Humanities program. Author of Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway)

“Discussing writers and texts from Walt Whitman to The Wizard of Oz, and many more besides, Narrating a New Mobility Landscape offers an immensely rich and provocative work of cultural history charting the American obsession with the road. Vogel brilliantly explores how the road culture of modern American life was developed at the turn of the twentieth century, demonstrating deftly how automobility became essential to modern American life. In doing so, the book also poses crucial questions for current debates about how to achieve more just and sustainable landscapes of mobility.” 

(Andrew Thacker, Professor of Modernism at Nottingham Trent University, UK, author of several books, including Modernism, Space, and the City: Outsiders and Affect in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and London and Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism)

 

“In Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in the Modern American Road Story, 1893-1921, Andrew Vogel brilliantly delineates the historical conditions that fostered US embrace of “mass automobility” as well as the road narratives that spurred but also mystified a nation’s dependence on the motorized vehicle. This deeply erudite, theoretically informed, and eminently readable study will serve as indispensable companion reading for anyone seeking to understand the road narrative in its literary, sociological, and ecological context.” (William Merrill Decker, Regents Professor of English at Oklahoma State University, USA, author of several books, including Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler)

 

“Andrew Vogel’s meticulously researched study of the early development of the US highway system sheds ne“w light on how the American road creates and represents specific kinds of material, cultural, and literary spaces. Through an engaging prose style that will appeal to both academic and general readers, Vogel’s important book expands on previous studies of US road literature to reshape our thinking about the relationship in such texts between space, landscape, mobility, and identity at the turn into the twentieth century.” (Gary Totten, Professor of English at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA and Editor-in-Chief of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, author of Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow, coeditor of Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing)

Andrew Vogel is the Honors Program Director and a Professor of English at Kutztown State University of Pennsylvania, where he listens, teaches, and walks the hills in the original homelands of the Lenape peoples.