Resource Guide for the History of Cars and Highways
Car culture, fuel taxes, highway development, and suburban development
Image 1. The head of Rusk Avenue in Houston, with the car approaching Bagby Street. In the background are the I-45 viaduct over Buffalo Bayou and the western terminus for the Purple and Green light rail lines. Photo by author.
Last Tuesday, I posted an essay titled, “City Streets Are Funded Through General Revenue.” This discussed some different ways of assigning responsibility for street improvements, and juxtaposed these to present-day attitudes about streets. One person posted some interesting questions in the comments. Today I am sharing a reading list in order to make the history a little more accessible. There is plenty more out there, but I am only sharing sources I have read, though there are a few from this list which I have not read cover-to-cover.
Car Culture
A few of these books are pro-automobile.
David Blanke, Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America’s Car Culture, 1900-1940 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007).
Scott Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
James Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
Peter Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
John B. Rae, The Road and Car in American Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971).
Christopher Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).
Fuel Taxes
John Chynoweth Burnham, “The Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48:3 (1961), 435-59.
Abdel M. Fawzy, James W. Martin, and Mark Frishe, “Development of the Motor-Fuels Tax in the United States,” The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 35:3 (1954), 209-24.
Christopher W. Wells, “Fueling the Boom: Gasoline Taxes, Invisibility, and the Growth of the American Highway Infrastructure, 1919-1956,” The Journal of American History 99:1 (2012), 72-81.
Highway Development
A few of these discuss the history of road financing.
I. B. Holley, Jr. “Blacktop: How Asphalt Paving Came to the Urban United States,” Technology and Culture 44:4 (October 2003), 703–33. Added 20 April 2022.
Jane Kay Holtz, Asphalt Nation: How The Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
James Horrox and Gideon Weissman, “Transform Transportation: Strategies for a Healthy Future,” Frontier Group, 30 March 2021.
Eric Jaffe, The King’s Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America (New York: Scribner, 2010).
Isaac B. Potter, The Gospel of Good Roads. A Letter to the American Farmer. (New York: League of American Wheelmen, 1891).
Carlton Reid, Roads Were Not Built for Cars: How cyclists were the first to push for good roads & became the pioneers of motoring (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015).
Bruce E. Seeley, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
Erik Slotboom, Houston Freeways (Houston: Oscar “Erik” Slotboom, 2003).
Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2011).
Christopher W. Wells, “The Changing Nature of Country Roads: Farmers, Reformers, and the Shifting Uses of Rural Space, 1880-1905,” Agricultural History 80:2 (2006), 143-66.
Suburban Development
I included only books which address the twentieth century, though a few of these discuss the nineteenth century as well.
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2010).
Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson, Highland Park and River Oaks: The Origins of Garden Suburban Community Planning (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).
Robert Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996).
Marc Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Builders and Land Use Planning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
William S. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2013).