Author: Debra Jane SeltzerPublisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445669498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Book Description
A terrific, lavishly illustrated look at the fascinating world of American roadside signs.
Signs in America's Auto Age
Author: John A. JaklePublisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587294826
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
Signs orient, inform, persuade, and regulate. They help give meaning to our natural and human-built environment, to landscape and place. In Signs in America’s Auto Age, cultural geographer John Jakle and historian Keith Sculle explore the ways in which we take meaning from outdoor signs and assign meaning to our surroundings—the ways we “read” landscape. With an emphasis on how the use of signs changed as the nation’s geography reorganized around the coming of the automobile, Jakle and Sculle consider the vast array of signs that have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Signs, Streets, and Storefronts
Author: Martin TreuPublisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142140494X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 429
Book Description
Treu tackles the architectural history and signage of Main Street and the strip—from painted boards nailed over crude storefronts to sleek cinemas topped with neon glitz. Honorable Mention, Architecture and Urban Planning, 2012 PROSE Awards Signs, Streets, and Storefronts addresses more than 200 years of signs and place-marking along America’s commercial corridors. From small-town squares to Broadway, State Street, and Wilshire Boulevard, Martin Treu follows design developments into the present and explores issues of historic preservation. Treu considers “common” architecture and its place-defining business signs as well as influential high-style design examples by taste-making leaders. Combining advertising and architectural history, the book presents a full picture of the commercial landscape, including design adaptations made for motorists and the migration from Main Street to suburbia. The dynamic between individual businesses and the common good has a major effect on the appearance of our country's Main Streets. Several forces are at work: technological advances, design imagination and the media, corporate propaganda, customer needs, and municipal mandates. Present-day controls have often led to a denuding of traditional commercial corridors. Such reform, Treu argues, has suppressed originality and radically cleared away years of accumulated history based on the taste of a single generation. A must-read for city planners, town councils, architects, sign designers, concerned citizens, and anyone who cares about the appearance and vitality of America’s commercial streets, this heavily illustrated book is equally appealing to armchair historians, small-town enthusiasts, and lovers of Americana.
Road Trips in the USA
Author: DK TravelPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593965140
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 696
Book Description
Hit the open road with 50 epic drives promising the all-American adventure Whether you’ve always dreamed of skirting the US on a motorcycle, are looking to go coast-to-coast in an RV or simply want to roll down your car windows and plug into a classic playlist, Road Trips in the USA will give you all the inspiration you need for a road trip to remember. Featuring 50 once-in-a-lifetime drives, Road Trips in the USA is a celebration of riding the open road. Turn the pages to discover: 50 driving routes ranging from a few hours, such as the scenic Hana Highway, to week-long trips like the iconic Route 66 Inspirational maps pinpointing all the key stops to make en route, such as classic landmarks and historic restaurants Practical information for each trip, including start and end stops, duration, distance, and road conditions Beautiful photography capturing the highlights of every drive Twist through Glacier National Park on the dramatic Going-to-the-Sun Road, leaf-peep along the Blue Ridge Parkway and enjoy the ocean breeze on the Pacific Coast Highway – with Road Trips in the USA, taking the scenic route has never been easier. There’s no better way to see the US than from behind the wheel, so buckle up for the stuff of road-trip dreams.
Roadtripping USA
Author: Let's Go Inc.Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312335694
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 1030
Book Description
All one needs is this book, a full tank of gas, and the open road to take advantage of these classic American cross-country journeys distilled into one volume for the first time. The book highlights the best experiences along each route, while providing maps, lodging and food listings, and practical tips.
Italian Signs, American Streets
Author: Fred L. GardaphéPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
In the first major critical reading of Italian American narrative literature in two decades, Fred L. Gardaphé presents an interpretive overview of Italian American literary history. Examining works from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, he develops a new perspective--variously historical, philosophical, and cultural--by which American writers of Italian descent can be read, increasing the discursive power of an ethnic literature that has received too little serious critical attention. Gardaphé draws on Vico's concept of history, as well as the work of Gramsci, to establish a culture-specific approach to reading Italian American literature. He begins his historical reading with narratives informed by oral traditions, primarily autobiography and autobiographical fiction written by immigrants. From these earliest social-realist narratives, Gardaphé traces the evolution of this literature through tales of "the godfather" and the mafia; the "reinvention of ethnicity" in works by Helen Barolini, Tina DeRosa, and Carole Maso; the move beyond ethnicity in fiction by Don DeLillo and Gilbert Sorrentino; to the short fiction of Mary Caponegro, which points to a new direction in Italian American writing. The result is both an ethnography of Italian American narrative and a model for reading the signs that mark the "self-fashioning" inherent in literary and cultural production. Italian Signs, American Streets promises to become a landmark in the understanding of literature and culture produced by Italian Americans. It will be of interest not only to students, critics, and scholars of this ethnic experience, but also to those concerned with American literature in general and the place of immigrant and ethnic literatures within that wide framework.
Tavern Signs of America
Author: Helene SmithPublisher: MacDonald Sward Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 122
Book Description
Only comprehensive book on subject. The history of America reflected on tavern signs advertising the town centers before there were court houses, schools, community centers and restaurants. A window view of what tavern life was like back when political issues were settled around a tavern table and cock fights and public hangings were the entertainment of the day -- in a so-called less violent era, the good old days.
Author: Remembering Roadside America
Author: John A. JaklePublisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572338334
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Book Description
The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten. In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history. Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.” John A. Jakle is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the former head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. They have coauthored such books as America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Automobile Age; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; and The Gas Station in America.
