By Earl Swift
An artificial ask yourself, a connective community, an fiscal strength, a bringer of blight and sprawl and the opportunity of escape—the U.S. interstate approach replaced the face of our nation. The massive Roads charts the construction of those crucial American highways. From the turn-of-the-century motor vehicle racing entrepreneur who spurred the citizen-led “Good Roads” stream, to the handful of pushed engineers who conceived of the interstates and the way they might work—years ahead of President Eisenhower knew the plans existed—to the protests that erupted around the country while highways reached the towns and located humans unwilling to be uprooted within the identify of growth, speedy follows a winding, interesting direction via twentieth-century American life.
How did we get from dust tracks to expressways, from major streets to off-ramps, from dust to concrete and metal, in lower than a century? via many years of politics, activism, and marvels of engineering, we realize in our highways the wanderlust, grand scale, and conflicting notions of citizenship and growth that outline the USA.
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Extra info for The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
Sample text
In contrast to the preoccupation of his contemporary strategists like Thomas Schelling with the precise calibration of force, he argued instead that military violence inevitably tended to cripple the policies in whose name it was invoked as it developed a momentum of its own: War for a non-aggressor nation is actually a nearly complete collapse of policy. Once war comes, then nearly all pre-war policy is utterly invalid because the setting in which it was designed to function no longer corresponds with the facts of reality.
Indd 28 8/25/2007 6:38:55 PM No substitute for victory 29 the United States required only garrisons for the harbour fortifications and a constabulary to pacify the frontier and deal with unforeseen emergencies – tasks performed by a regular Army of 6,000 to 15,000 prior to the Civil War, and about 26,000 after the end of Reconstruction. In wartime, the Regulars’ role was to provide professional expertise and guidance for the mass volunteer Army of citizen-soldiers. 62 In an accurate summary of the influence of republican political culture on the military, Colonel Arthur L.
In General Ulysses S. Grant’s conception of the art of war, conversely, there is no sense that war’s logic derives from anything outside the logic of force itself: ‘The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. ’21 Due to its emphasis on the ‘unrefinable’ nature of military force, the ‘War is Hell’ discourse was profoundly hostile to attempts to impose political constraints on warfare. On the contrary, it demanded an anti-Clausewitzian view of the use of force as a response to the failure of politics or diplomacy rather than an instrument of politics or diplomacy.