"Scholars researching transportation history, public policy, and American federalism will have much to learn from this text."—H-Net Reviews“Katherine Johnson’s The American Road stakes out important new territory in the political history of twentieth-century American transportation. Her twin focus on the emergence of an expansive, state-level administrative apparatus and a federal highway system that deferred substantial road-building authority to the states provides an important corrective to historical narratives that overstate the centralizing forces of a national bureaucracy. It is no easy feat to capture the extensive regional variation contained within a federally sponsored, state-managed highway construction system, but Johnson offers up fresh insights with grace, clarity, and analytic force.”—Michael R. Fein, author of Paving the Way: New York Road Building and the American State, 1880–1956
“This fascinating and analytically rich study offers a new explanation for the development of the American highway system. It moves beyond existing accounts in making the case for viewing roadbuilding and infrastructural development as crucial tasks of state and federal governance. Katherine Johnson presents a persuasive argument in favor of locating the history of the American road system in institutional and bureaucratic contests over power, politics, and geography.”—Jason Scott Smith, professor of history and graduate director, University of New Mexico, and author of “Understanding the New Deal in an Age of Trump and Brexit”
“The American Road tracks the political maneuvering behind the greatest public works program in history: the twentieth-century US highway network. Through deep archival digging and brilliant analysis, Johnson overturns the received wisdom about the logic behind the (un)holy alliance of state highway officials who laid down four million miles of pavement. This story adds a vital new chapter to our understanding of American federalism and how it has served the rapid (if rapacious) spatial development of the country.”—Richard A. Walker, professor of geography emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
“Johnson’s book elegantly lays out the origins and dysfunctions of the American highway system. Led by the small but mighty Bureau of Public Roads, a nascent intergovernmental highway bureaucracy including state highway officials created a ‘powerful extraconstitutional authority’ that overcame the complexity and limitations of the American state. This book is a powerful addition toward our understanding of modern American statebuilding during the twentieth century.”—Kimberley Johnson, professor of social and cultural analysis, New York University
“The American Road offers a powerful new perspective for understanding how the automobile came to define American life. It was not a cultural love affair with the car but rather the extraordinary influence of organized state highway officials that propelled the expansion of the highway system. Drawing on a wealth of historical research, Johnson shows how these officials leveraged their special power within the federal system to dominate transportation policymaking. A must-read for transportation scholars and for students of American political development.”—Margaret Weir, Wilson Professor of International and Public Affairs and professor of political science, Brown University
