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Summary
Summary
This lavishly illustrated book explores the vast publicity surrounding eight milestone transcontinental auto trips in the early twentieth century, and how this publicity produced a variety of changes in American life. Earlier coast-to-coast trips (described in the author's Coast-to-Coast by Automobile: The Pioneering Trips, 1899-1908 (Stanford, 2000) were also attention-grabbing events, but it was not until Pennsylvania lumberman Jacob Murdock became the first man to drive his family across the continent, that the average American began to see the automobile as a useful, practical means of traveling long distances. Murdock's trip ended the period when automakers (and others) would sponsor a cross-country trip merely to prove that it could be done.
The later trips chronicled in this book reflected the remarkable developments in automobile technology and durability, and demonstrated the automobile's recreational, military, and commercial possibilities as well. The accounts of these exciting trips--carried in newspapers and magazines across the land--captivated Americans. Our familiarity with modern interstate highways only increases our wonder that in the early twentieth century adventurous motorists were resourceful and determined enough to establish cross-country driving records when the few roads connecting cities were snow-clogged in winter, mud-bogged in spring, and pockmarked with deep and dusty ruts the rest of the year. These trips, which vividly illustrated what one observer called the "crying need for good roads" in the United States, are illustrated by some 125 rare photographs.
Author Notes
Curt McConnell, in addition to Coast-to-Coast by Automobile: The Pioneering Trips, is the author of Great Cars of the Great Plains, "A Reliable Car and a Woman Who Knows It": The First Coast-to-Coast Auto Trips by Women, 1899-1916, and Coast-to-Coast Auto Races of the Early 1900s.
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
Today people drive hundreds of miles daily while trucks take goods across country in a few days; yet less than a hundred years ago, intrepid professional drivers set coast-to-coast records measured in weeks. The first automobile crossing in 1903 took 72 days; by 1916, the record stood at five days. Such epic runs convinced the public, the military, and the government of the automobile's value. Autoists delivered newspapers, personal messages, and military dispatches faster than the railroad, insuring the automobile's supremacy in the decades to come. McConnell's history of eight pioneering trips across North America is interesting and readable, although somewhat repetitive. Completed as advertising ventures for companies such as Hudson, Cadillac, and Marmon, they spurred development of the Lincoln Highway, the nation's first transcontinental road. Even though the runs attracted local attention, newspapers no longer saw them as newsworthy. The final blow came with the US entry into WW I, which refocused American interests. Overall, this is a work more interesting to general readers, as McConnell fails to delve very deeply into the auto's general place in US history. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Public libraries and undergraduates. D. R. Jamieson Ashland University