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A beautifully illustrated, first-of-its-kind chronicle of road maps through the ages.

Road maps are the most common form of map that most of us regularly interact with while we all seek to find our way from here to there. Today, the digital maps on our devices are just the latest in a series of cartographic innovations designed to make transportation of people and goods easier and more predictable. Whether traveling on foot, in a vehicle, or by animal, people have long created and relied on roads, and efforts to map these overland routes predate the invention of the printing press. Yet the vast majority of road maps have been produced only within the last five hundred years—and even more specifically within the last century.

Historian Jeremy Black is the first to chart the tale of road maps, beginning with the "Peutinger Map," which illustrated the roads famously connecting the Roman Empire. From the time of antiquity, Black guides the reader through the centuries all the way to the modern age, when the invention of the automobile spurred the creation of roads and road maps like nothing before. Over the course of this journey, Black illuminates the integral role maps played in the development of government infrastructures through time and across all the inhabited continents. And, arriving in the present day, Black shows how technology may soon make the paper road map obsolete even as it builds on the conventions of the preceding centuries.

Featuring a series of full-color maps from the British Library's collection and beyond, A History of Roads in 100 Maps is an eye-opening visual story of how modern civilizations traversed, constructed, and connected their worlds.

Recounts the history of the Good Roads Movement that arose in progressive-era Alabama, how it used the power of the state to achieve its objectives of improving market roads for farmers and highways for automobiles

Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928 explores the history of the Good Roads Movement and investigates the nature of early twentieth-century progressivism in the state. Martin T. Olliff reveals how middle-class reformers secured political, economic, and social power not only by fighting against corporate domination and labor recalcitrance but also by proposing alternative projects like road improvement and identifying the interests of the rising middle class as being the most important to public interest.

With the development of national markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans began to regard the nation as a whole, rather than their state or region, as the most important political entity. Many Alabamians wished to travel beyond their local communities in all seasons without getting stuck in the mud of rudimentary rutted dirt roads. The onset of the automobile age bolstered the need for roadmaking, alerting both automobilists and good roads advocates to the possibility of a new transportation infrastructure. The Good Roads Movement began promoting farm-to-market roads, then highways that linked cities, then those that connected states. Federal matching funds for road construction after 1916 led state and federal governments to supplant the Good Roads Movement, building and administering the highway system that emerged by the late 1920s.

Olliff’s study of how Alabamians dealt with strained resources and overcame serious political obstacles in order to construct a road system that would accommodate economic growth in the twentieth century may offer clues to the resurrection of a similar strategy in our modern era. Many problems are unchanged over the hundred years between crises: Alabamians demand good roads and a government that has the capacity to build and maintain such an infrastructure while, at the same time, citizens are voting into office men and women who promise lower taxes and smaller government.

An eyewitness account of this controversial environmental action.

Construction plans for the reroute of Highway 55 through south Minneapolis sparked an environmental movement that pitted activists against public authorities in one of the most dramatic episodes in the city’s history. Mary Losure was there; as a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio she witnessed the neighborhood’s transformation from a quiet street to the center of an emotionally charged standoff. Fueled by idealism and anger, a diverse coalition banded together to try to stop the highway expansion. Beginning in 1998, this group sustained protests for more than one year and eventually faced an unprecedented show of force by law enforcement.

Imagining equitable streets for all

For the past century, our roadways have been engineered as pipes for cars, but they offer vast potential as public spaces. From New York and Boston to Portland and Los Angeles, cities are rethinking their streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the asphalt roadway. Reclaiming the Road traces the historical evolution of America’s streets and explores contemporary movements to retake them from cars—temporarily and permanently—for diverse forms of mobility and community life. To share the street raises important questions of equity, in transportation and beyond. David L. Prytherch proposes a bold, intersectional vision of a more just street.

Reclaiming the Road connects cutting-edge theory, policy analysis, and firsthand accounts from those leading the charge in transforming our streets to advocate for changing how we think about and design roads. Prytherch features case studies of nine major cities in the United States to show how experiments in reclaiming streets accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic to become lasting changes. Through in-depth interviews, he shares stories of how planners, transportation advocates, and community leaders have implemented innovative programs for slowing neighborhood streets, opening roads for walking and biking, and reconstructing roadways with public parklets and street plazas as social spaces for curbside conversation.

Examining movements to transform streets through the lenses of equity and justice, Reclaiming the Road tackles the conceptual challenge of defining mobility justice and the practicalities of planning a more just public street, offering a compelling vision for the future of America’s public spaces.

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To be a Christian is to be a convert. The word “convert” applies in a real sense both to cradle-born Catholics and to those, traditionally regarded as converts, who become Catholics as adults. The Catholic Church is the divinely established framework of the program of a conversion, which Christ presented as a thorough change of mind and heart (metanoia). While for a cradle-born Catholic the implementation of that program is usually a gradual process, for converts it contains a momentous act as they vote, so to speak, with their feet, on behalf of Truth, by joining the Church as the One True Fold, the Sole Ark of Salvation, to recall hallowed phrases dear to John Henry Newman, easily the greatest convert during the nineteenth century.
  The aim of this book is to summarize the lives of notable converts from Britain and Ireland and explain (by reference to quotations from their writings) why they entered the Catholic Church. These reasons were many. Some looked chiefly at history and saw the apostolic Church in their day to be residing in the Catholic communion. Others, though appreciating the fact of the gift of faith, saw reason as the chief support of the step they were taking. To yet others it was the endurance of both the Church and that remarkable office of the papacy that proved the necessary stimulus. Many were inspired by the witness of some unsung saint in their neighbourhood. Some were eminent even before their “move to Rome,” others almost completely unknown. Some found fame on their conversion, others suffered greatly for their zeal for the one true fold of Christ. Some came into the Church relatively early in life, others entered at the final hour, even while on their death bed.
 Taken altogether these accounts provide a profound and moving witness to the operation of divine grace in human souls.

'As a movement for social change it is important that we understand our own history. This is a compelling read.'

From the anti-roads protests of the 1990s to HS2 and Extinction Rebellion, conflict and protest have shaped the politics of transport. In 1989, Margaret Thatcher's government announced 'the biggest road-building programme since the Romans.' This is the inside story of the thirty tumultuous years that have followed.

Roads, Runways and Resistance draws on over 50 interviews with government ministers, advisors and protestors - many of whom, including 'Swampy', speak here for the first time about the events they describe. It is a story of transport ministers undermined by their own Prime Ministers, protestors attacked or quietly supported by the police, and smartly-dressed protestors who found a way onto the roof of the Houses of Parliament.

Today, as a new wave of road building and airport expansion threatens to bust Britain's carbon budgets, climate change protestors find themselves on a collision course with the government. Melia asks, what difference did the protests of the past make? And what impacts might today's protest movements have on the transport of the future?

From its invention in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, the automobile crisscrossed the world, completely took over the cities, and became a feature of daily life. Considered basic to the American lifestyle, the car reflected individualism, pragmatism, comfort, and above all modernity. In Latin America, it served as a symbol of distinction, similar to jewelry or fine clothing. In The Cultural Life of the Automobile, Guillermo Giucci focuses on the automobile as an instrument of social change through its “kinetic modernity” and as an embodiment of the tremendous social impact of technology on cultural life.

Material culture—how certain objects generate a wide array of cultural responses—has been the focus of much scholarly discussion in recent years. The automobile wrought major changes and inspired images in language, literature, and popular culture. Focusing primarily on Latin America but also covering the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa, Giucci examines how the automobile was variously adapted by different cultures and how its use shaped and changed social and economic relationships within them. At the same time, he shows how the “automobilization” of society became an essential support for the development of modern individualism, and the automobile its clearest material manifestation.

A concise illustrated guidebook for those wishing to explore and know more about the storied gateway that made possible Alabama's development. 

Forged through the territory of the Creek Nation by the United States federal government, the Federal Road was developed as a communication artery linking the east coast of the United States with Louisiana. Its creation amplified already tense relationships between the government, settlers, and the Creek Nation, culminating in the devastating Creek War of 1813–1814, and thereafter it became the primary avenue of immigration for thousands of Alabama settlers.

Central to understanding Alabama’s territorial and early statehood years, the Federal Road was both a physical and symbolic thoroughfare that cut a swath of shattering change through the land and cultures it traversed. The road revolutionized Alabama’s expansion, altering the course of its development by playing a significant role in sparking a cataclysmic war, facilitating unprecedented American immigration, and enabling an associated radical transformation of the land itself.

The first half of The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide offers a narrative history that includes brief accounts of the construction of the road, the experiences of historic travelers, and descriptions of major changes to the road over time. The authors vividly reconstruct the course of the road in detail and make use of a wealth of well-chosen illustrations. Along the way they give attention to the very terrain it traversed, bringing to life what traveling the road must have been like and illuminating its story in a way few others have ever attempted.

The second half of the volume is divided into three parts—Eastern, Central, and Southern—and serves as a modern traveler’s guide to the Federal Road. This section includes driving tours and maps, highlighting historical sites and surviving portions of the old road and how to visit them.