Car Country: An Environmental History (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) - Hardcover

Wells, Christopher W.

3.77

105 ratings by Goodreads

9780295992150: Car Country: An Environmental History (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0295992158 ISBN 13: 9780295992150

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2013

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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 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 tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. 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.

Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48LTKOxxrXQ

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Review:

[Car Country] is an excellent and needed addition to the still remarkably small literature that explores the combined histories of Americans, automobiles, and the environment.

--Tom McCarthy "The Michigan Historical 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. . . . Wells's book is a remarkable achievement.

--Theodore Strathman "Southern California Quarterly "

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.

-- (01/01/2014)

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.

-- (01/01/2014)

[I]maginative and accessible. . . . General US historians should pay attention to Car Country. It joins a growing body of environmental history that is revising the traditional narrative of US history.

-- (01/01/2016)

For students and inhabitants of car country, Wells offers a terrific excavation of the sprawlscape that still drives our days.

--Human Ecology

A fresh, well-documented history of roadbuilding policies in the United States between 1900 and 1960.

-- (01/01/2014)

Wells has produced an important and persuasive new chapter in the history of American car culture.

-- (01/01/2013)

Wells argues that in order to understand how automobility has become so deeply 'locked in' to contemporary American society, historians and geographers would do better to focus on the built landscape . . . [Car Country] belongs in the library of anyone interested in transportation, infrastructure, mobility, and land-use in twentieth-century America.

-- (01/01/2014)

About the Author:

Christopher W. Wells is associate professor of environmental history at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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