Another Road: Myth and Pavement in the American Imagination

With Another Road, author and scholar Ed Caudill has rewarded readers with a new and unique view of the American highway. The book offers a fascinating view of the importance of American roads, traveling down the muddy cowpaths of the early republic to cruising over the wide and often-controversial multi-layered interstates of modern life. This book is a travel guide, not to a place or a route, but to a way into cultural values-myths-and how roads empower Americans to do the one thing they enjoy and need more than all else: to "hit the road." The impulse to motion expedites traditions of this being a land of opportunity, egalitarianism, of a frontier "out there, " unique individualism and even rebelliousness.
For Americans, there is always someplace else to go, some new vista to see, some new landscape to contemplate. We take for granted our right to travel, and so we should. It is a right carved into our laws and our psyches. This book tells you why and how we do that.