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Sto caricando le informazioni... The King's Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made Americadi Eric Jaffe
   Nessuno Sto caricando le informazioni...
 Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro.  Othemts | Sep 8, 2023 |    ) GaylaBassham | May 27, 2018 | ) gayla.bassham | Nov 7, 2016 | Jaffe's interest started in New York, questioning why there was a road called Boston in the Bronx. I traveled the Charles River in my red kayak; Jaffe drove the Boston Post Road in his red Mini Cooper. The Post Road started out in colonial times as a rugged trail, barely passable by horse. As the colonies united and the revolutionary fires grew, the link between Boston and New York became even more important. Intrepid riders would ride from tavern to tavern with wax-sealed letters. The trek would take at least a week. The Boston Post Road was actually two separate routes. There was the inland route that ran west from Boston to Springfield, then south to Hartford and New Haven, before turning to New York City. The coastal route ran southwest from Boston to Providence, then hugged the coast as it met up with the inland route in New Haven. The linking of cities was initially not about transportation. It was about communication. It was a key route for communication between two important hot spots of the revolution. The road eventually improved in places and coaches began moving passengers, slowly, between the cities and points in between. Then roads moved back towards disrepair as railroads blossomed. Even today, the Amtrak lines follow the paths of the Old Post Road, with an inland route through Springfield and the coastal route through Providence. It was bicycles that revived the roads. Recreational riders were looking for the best roads to reach the countryside. The Good Roads movement was supported by the bicycle riders groups and bicycle manufacturers. Then, the manufacturers tried putting engines onto bicycles and the age of the automobile began and its thirst was roadways was insatiable. By the 1940s the Boston Post Road was an illustration of the inadequacy of road-building. The expressway era was about to begin and emerge as the national system of interstate highways. The King's Best Highway is a great tale of transportation in the Boston-New York corridor. Jaffe wanders off the road a bit when he over-emphasizes the importance of the road. I found the segment on President Lincoln's pre-election travels to be a traffic jam. The books ends with Jaffe's delightful telling of his own travels on the old road. It was no longer the "narrow slit of poorly groomed earth" from the colonial times. It was mostly a "gluttonous commercial wild." (  )1  dougcornelius | Dec 2, 2013 |  ) JBGUSA | Mar 31, 2013 | nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
A VIVID AND FASCINATING LOOK AT AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH THE PRISM OF THE COUNTRY'S MOST STORIED HIGHWAY, THE BOSTON POST ROAD During its evolution from Indian trails to modern interstates, the Boston Post Road, a system of over-land routes between New York City and Boston, has carried not just travelers and mail but the march of American history itself. Eric Jaffe captures the progress of people and culture along the road through four centuries, from its earliest days as the king of England's "best highway" to the current era. Centuries before the telephone, radio, or Internet, the Boston Post Road was the primary conduit of America's prosperity and growth. News, rumor, political intrigue, financial transactions, and personal missives traveled with increasing rapidity, as did people from every walk of life. From post riders bearing the alarms of revolution, to coaches carrying George Washington on his first presidential tour, to railroads transporting soldiers to the Civil War, the Boston Post Road has been essential to the political, economic, and social development of the United States. Continuously raised, improved, rerouted, and widened for faster and heavier traffic, the road played a key role in the advent of newspapers, stagecoach travel, textiles, mass-produced bicycles and guns, commuter railroads, automobiles--even Manhattan's modern grid. Many famous Americans traveled the highway, and it drew the keen attention of such diverse personages as Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, P. T. Barnum, J. P. Morgan, and Robert Moses. Eric Jaffe weaves this entertaining narrative with a historian's eye for detail and a journalist's flair for storytelling. A cast of historical figures, celebrated and unknown alike, tells the lost tale of this road. Revolutionary printer William Goddard created a postal network that united the colonies against the throne. General Washington struggled to hold the highway during the battle for Manhattan. Levi Pease convinced Americans to travel by stagecoach until, half a century later, Nathan Hale convinced them to go by train. Abe Lincoln, still a dark-horse candidate in early 1860, embarked on a railroad speaking tour along the route that clinched the presidency. Bomb builder Lester Barlow, inspired by the Post Road's notorious traffic, nearly sold Congress on a national system of expressways twenty-five years before the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. Based on extensive travels of the highway, interviews with people living up and down the road, and primary sources unearthed from the great libraries between New York City and Boston--including letters, maps, contemporaneous newspapers, and long-forgotten government documents--The King's Best Highway is a delightful read for American history buffs and lovers of narrative everywhere. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari
 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)388.10974Social sciences Commerce, Communications, Transportation Transportation RoadsClassificazione LCVotoMedia: (3.78)
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The road continued to be adapted to the times and in the 19th century was lined with streetcar tracks while railroads were built parallel or sometimes right on to the road itself. This grew into the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad which Jaffe paints as particularly corrupt (but that was true of all the railroad companies). A late 19th-century revival of interest in "Good Roads" was not spearheaded by the arrival of the new motorcar, but by bicycle manufacturer Albert Pope who advocated for paved roads for cycling.
Nevertheless, the new automobiles soon swamped the Old Post Road which was appropriately assigned to be part of route number US 1 in the new highways system that debuted in 1925. Efforts to alleviate traffic lead to the Post Road being paralleled by parkways in the 1920s-30s and then overlaid in many places by the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s. Jaffe ends the book with an account of his own cruise along the Boston Post Road as it survives today, which is a depressing story of traffic congestion, strip malls full of retail chains, and very little evidence of the road's august history.
Apart from the story of the road itself, Jaffe includes various stories that keep the narrative interesting. These include:
I kind of found Jaffe's writing tone to be too "jokey" at times, and his writing about the native peoples of America lacked cultural competency. But there was nothing about the work that made me doubt the quality of his scholarship. The King's Best Highway proved to be an illuminating way of relating the history of New York and New England by linking the stories together with the history of this most important road. (