Grad Research: Reconsidering the Interstate Highway System
The following post comes to us from UT AMS Ph.D. student Brendan Gaughen:
"Life doesn't happen along the interstates," wrote William Least Heat-Moon, "It's against the law." The quote comes from his first novel-travelogue Blue Highways: A Journey Into America (1982), and he is not alone in his view. The Interstate Highway System has been blamed for a number of things such as physically dividing urban communities along racial lines, slowly choking the enterprise in rural towns, and shifting our perception of distance from miles to minutes.
Heat-Moon's disdain for Interstates has been consistent since his first work. Part Kerouac's On the Road (minus the stream-of-consciousness wanderings), part Steinbeck's Travels With Charley (minus Charley), Blue Highways explores the American landscape and people as seen by driving the nation's small roads, the narrow sinews once connecting travelers to mostly rural destinations -- roads that formerly appeared light blue in the Rand McNally road atlas. (Heat-Moon would likely lament the fact that it is not the local roads but the Interstates that now appear blue in the road atlas.) He has since written a handful of other books demonstrating his fondness for the American landscape as experienced by avoiding the Interstate Highway System: covering Chase County Kansas on foot (PrairyErth: A Deep Map), crossing the continent by boat (River Horse: A Voyage Across America), and exploring different regions by rural road (Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey).
Heat-Moon isn't the first, nor the last, to prefer a slower, earlier version of automobile transportation. John Steinbeck, writing in the late 1960s, said, "When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing." Charles Kuralt, who spent nearly three decades wandering the United States and reporting on his findings for CBS News, wrote, "The interstate highway system is a wonderful thing. It makes it possible to go from coast to coast without seeing anything or meeting anybody. If the United States interests you, stay off the interstates." Humorist Bill Bryson offered in Made in America, "In less than two decades, America's modern interstate highways drained the life from thousands of towns. No longer was it necessary - and before long not even possible - to partake of the traditional offerings of two-lane America."These authors, like many Americans, romanticize rural towns, the places often bypassed by Interstate highway construction. These are the places that exist in the public imagination in a particular way -- the mythic "Main Street", ideological opposite of Wall Street, a symbolic landscape that is the home of traditional values, of the tenacity of a nation to withstand hard times, of places untouched by progress, of simpler times. These are the out-of-the-way places many city-dwellers like to visit as curiosities but would cringe at the thought of breaking down and getting stuck -- the kinds of town that each claim notoriety for having the world's largest ball of twine, world's tallest coal shovel, being the birthplace of someone now barely remembered, or if none of these, the home of past state champion high school sports teams.
Whereas the older small town is perceived as traditional, simple, and slow-paced, the Interstate crossroads is efficient, modern, running 24-hours -- a distinction between the general store and its single fuel pump against the city-in-itself truck stop. These authors do not hesitate to point out how technological progress has come at a great price, and prefer to avoid the superhighways altogether. With the entire highway system covering nearly 47,000 miles, avoiding Interstates can be difficult to achieve. They carry traffic to, through, and near every major city in the nation and to every capital in the lower 48 states except Dover, Delaware. Texas alone has 17 different routes comprising over 3000 miles of Interstate highway.
Urban Interstates are designed to maximize efficiency -- getting the highest volume of traffic as far as possible in the shortest amount of time. Unfortunately they seem today more like reminders of an aging infrastructure with no room to accommodate a growing traffic problem. They have been criticized as primarily serving the middle and upper classes at the expense of the poor, of carving up once-thriving neighborhoods and displacing low-income residents, and of compromising the health of those living nearby. Existing primarily for high-density traffic flow, there really isn't anything notable about most urban interstates except perhaps the 21-lane wide stretch of I-5 on the north side of San Diego, or that sections of Los Angeles' 405 carry nearly 400,000 vehicles per day.Outside the metropolitan area, the older Federal Highway System was bound by geography, covering the contour of the land, the rise and fall and twist and bend. For the most part, the Interstates take the shortest route possible, unbound by geographic restraints. This can mean carving away hillsides, tunneling under mountain passes, or crossing swamps where earlier highways avoided such shortcuts, demonstrating an unwavering faith in progress and technological solutions. In one notable example, a proposal for routing I-40 across California's Mojave Desert, fortunately rejected, involved detonating atomic bombs to level the Bristol Mountains as part of Eisenhower's Atoms For Peace program. 35 years after the first stretch of concrete was laid in mid-1956, the Interstate Highway System was declared "complete" (with some additions being since made or currently in progress), in what proved to be the largest construction project in human history -- and at an estimated $425 billion (2006), the most expensive.
Despite the justifiable criticism of the Interstate Highway System, it is an important part of American society. Its construction has transformed the way Americans move, firmly entrenching long-distance continental travel from rail to highway. And despite the claims of the authors mentioned in this post, there is plenty to see. Over the next few weeks, I will be introducing you to my favorite 5 stretches of interstate highway, which I've selected as being particularly scenic or notable engineering marvels. Stay tuned for the first installment, coming soon: I-8 Alpine CA -- Ocotillo CA.
5 Questions with Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
This week we bring you the next installment in a series of interviews with AMS faculty members: 5 Questions with Associate Professor Elizabeth Engelhardt.
1. What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?
My favorite project is always my next project. There is an interesting way that all of the projects lead one to the next. Even as writing a book about Appalachia might on the surface seem really different from writing a book about Southern food, I did the first research on the food project out of a bunch of material I was finding in Appalachia and didn’t know what to do with. So it sort of led me off into then doing the next project. You know, it’s easy to look backward and put a straight line on it, thinking, “Clearly I progressed from this to that.” I don’t think it was a straight line, but I do think that one has led to the other, which is one of the great joys of this particular career.2. How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy and contemporary society?One of the things that I love most about studying food is that there’s knowledge in all kinds of communities, and it has led me into conversations that are really thoughtful and challenging in university classrooms, but just as much in public libraries, waiting in front of a food trailer for someone to hand you food, at festivals or churches or in family kitchens. For me, that is not only one of the challenges of doing the research but also one of the places where I think the things we do in American Studies make real bridges to the communities in which we are living.I have been increasingly thinking about what it means to do public humanities, where we need to be humble in that process but also where we are better for engaging in that process. I feel like my scholarship is better for the places I get out and talk with communities and sometimes those are communities in the present. Sometimes that is a real-life conversation where you’re sitting down across from each other. Sometimes those are archival communities that I get to listen in on through our historical methods, through our archival methods, and sometimes they’re communities that are best talked about through fiction, where the world of literature is a place where we can find these otherwise lost or subverted connections.I just recently started working with an archive of letters from farm women around the U.S. South. It is striking to me how they are united by their love of plants, their love of heritage plants in particular. The earliest letters are from the 1920s and they go through the early 1970s. So it’s at a time in the U.S. South where there is a real transition to industrial foodways, to more national food distribution processes, and these are a group of people who believe very strongly in the old knowledge and the old plants and what gardeners know and what farm women know. That’s their language for themselves, they call themselves “farm women” or “farm ladies.” But reading those letters, not only do I find them interesting academically, but I also find them interesting for how this group of women who are otherwise vey hard to document are having exactly those same kinds of conversations about books they love, histories they’re interested in, plants they love, and connections between universities and communities. I don’t think I’m doing anything different than the women in those collections are doing. But I still think we have a lot to learn from that process.We sort of act as if this idea of storing things in the cloud is a brand new idea. These women are saying very clearly, “This knowledge doesn’t exist in libraries. This knowledge exists between all of us and we need to be talking to each other. Hey, I know this person and you know that person. How about writing to this person?” And it’s exactly like cloud computing, it’s just happening through the rural mail system.3. Are there other projects, people, and/or things that have inspired your work?I think at age 2 I felt like I wanted to make the world a more just place. I did not think that everything worked fairly, and I wanted some explanations for that. In some ways I ask some of the same questions today as I’m doing my writing, as I’m doing my scholarship, as I’m doing my teaching. “How do we make this place better for all of us? How do we figure out who’s not included? How do we find ways for all of us to really hear each other?”I had an amazing godmother who comes from a town in western North Carolina that was then drowned by the TVA dams. In high school, she worked at a general store carrying 100-pound bags of flour and goods, which was not something that women tended to do. When her daughter started high school, Imogene went to college. When she was in her fifties she decided she had always wanted to know how to build houses, so she joined a housing crew for the summer. She gave me my first Margaret Atwood book, but she also gave me my first Wilma Dykeman book, my first explicitly feminist novel and my first explicitly Appalachian (and I would argue also feminist) novel. So she has always been a real inspiration for me.I think it’s also important that I went to a little public school from Kindergarten through graduating high school in western North Carolina. 45 of us started Kindergarten together; I graduate with 99 people in my class. I think 85 of us went to college. It was a little, amazing public school. It was also one of those havens of really fascinating teachers. I had a band teacher who had the high school band playing Dave Brubeck and other crazy, experimental jazz and experimental modernist music. He put on one of our summer marching halftime shows, which featured an overture written by one of the people in the band. I had a theater teacher who had us performing scenes from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I’m not sure many public high schools could get away with that today. These teachers introduced me to this world of weirdness and challenge and bizarre and wonderful and fascinating art, and they never assumed that we were too young or too innocent or too whatever to engage those materials. That was really important for who I am today.I just feel like the world is a really big and interesting and fascinating place, and the fact that I can have conversations about that, that I can read and write a little bit about it is amazing. And I can then be a part of other people figuring out what their contribution to it is going to be. It means that I can play a role in keeping the world one big and weird and wonderful place and have us think about how to make it open for those same folks who have been left out of it, who at age 2 made me think “that’s not fair.”4. What is your background as a scholar and how does this background inform and motivate your current teaching and research?That’s kind of a long answer for me. Out of that crazy, wonderful public school system I ended up very fortunately getting a scholarship to Duke University, which was a little different than most scholarships because it was explicitly a leadership scholarship, so during my entire 4 years of college, the question that was asked again and again, was, “How do you give back to your community?” The scholarship was established because Duke figured out they didn’t have many students from North or South Carolina, so the question was usually framed as, “How do you give back to North or South Carolina?” Early on, I made a shift to say, “What are my responsibilities to the mountains, to Appalachia, to this particular place that I’m from, this small part of North Carolina?” The political reality is that the mountains are generally not included when people talk about North Carolina in particular.When I went on to grad school at Emory, it felt important to me as well as a really good fit to be a part of the Women’s Studies program there. The Ph.D. program at Emory was still in its early stages, although they had already granted a couple of Ph.D.s. In fact, nationally, the idea of the Women’s Studies Ph.D. was still being worked out. “Is this going to be a thing?” For me it felt important to say I believe in this and I think this is an avenue of scholarship that is important, and I also think it’s the kind of program that should exist. But when I went to choose a dissertation topic, those questions from Duke were very much in my mind. “What’s my responsibility to the mountains?” So the fact that I ended up with a dissertation about Appalachia was not really a coincidence.After I got my Ph.D. from Emory, I was a visiting professor there for a year. I taught for two years at Ohio University, which is actually in the Appalachian Regional Commission’s designation of Appalachia. There are a few counties in Ohio that are in Appalachia, which was a very different view of Appalachia than the one I grew up with. My first tenure track job was at West Virginia University, and I was there for three years. I love the state of West Virginia. I still do volunteer work there; I still have real connections there. But that was a university that did not have a lot of resources and had not made as strong an argument as it could have to the citizens of the state of why you need a flagship university and what that can do for your state. So in many ways, for me, I’ve been able to do more for Appalachia and for that question, “What’s my responsibility to my home communities?” from this position in Texas, which is where I went next, than I was in West Virginia, which is ironic. But it also can be true.As I’ve been here now for seven years, I have also been able to shift that question to think about what my responsibility is to this community, and so a lot of my work with Foodways Texas has been trying to answer that question. I believe strongly in the intellectual project of Foodways Texas because I think that the food studies questions and story in Texas are important and crucial for the rest of the nation. But it also bears a piece of that research which, for me, is in answer to “What’s my responsibility to where I have landed?” It’s a way to get my head around “How do I answer that question that started a long time ago in my undergraduate program?”5. What projects would you like to work on in the future? In what directions do you imagine taking your work?That collection of farm women’s letters is on my mind right now because I am interested in the hidden food archives of women and men’s letters, knowledge of plants, the kinds of conversations that happen in curb markets and farmer’s markets that I started to deal with in A Mess of Greens but really didn’t get to expand.I’m just now working on a project to do a biography of one of the first Appalachian women novelists who I ever read, that same Wilma Dykeman who I mentioned earlier. It’s a project in its infancy, but it turns out that not only did she write novels about Appalachia, but she also wrote a book about why integration was crucial, and she wrote that book in the year following Brown vs. Board. She and her husband traveled around the U.S. South and tried to get a handle on what was going on. She wrote a book about birth control; she wrote stories about questioning the death penalty. She wrote about social justice activists. She is one of the first people to write about environmental justice in Appalachia. And there doesn’t exist a biography of her, so I’m working with some people in North Carolina to think about whether it’s time for that to happen, so I’m really excited about that.I’m excited about the Foodways Texas oral history project that we have going on right now, the Iconic Texas Restaurants project is just taking off, and it’s clear just how much interest there is in this state for that kind of project. So I’m very excited about that. I’m also working on an anthology with some folks over at the University of Mississippi on southern food methodologies, because we all feel that the field has matured enough to have a conversation about the methods that we can use to do any given project, so that’s pretty exciting also. And I probably have six others.*Bonus Question* If you could describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?I think American Studies resides in the conversations we have; I think it resists absolute definitions, which I think is a very good thing.For me, American Studies is a place where we try to understand these big, complicated communities and then we go about doing our best rather than stopping the project before it even starts because we don’t have the toolbox in place to answer it. To me that’s what is exciting about it. I played with the metaphor of the potluck in the beginning of the Barbeque book. I’ve played with the metaphor of the farmer’s market or curb market. There’s something I like about those metaphors for what American Studies is also. I don’t think that it is a field that I will ever or should know every conversation that is going on within it, much like at a potluck you’re not a part of all of the conversations that are happening or at the farmer’s market you’re not a part of all the exchanges that are going on. I think that little bit of chaos is really helpful.
Explore American Studies at Explore UT!
This weekend, American Studies students and professors will be taking part in Explore UT, "The biggest open house in Texas."AMS faculty members Janet Davis, Steven Hoelscher, and Randy Lewis will be giving public talks on different aspects of their research, and American Studies Graduate Students will be taking part in the Children’s International Festival on the South Mall from 11:00 a.m. - 4:40 p.m. This year, our booth features a game called "Follow that Food," which helps younger students understand how culture travels via international foodways. Kids will match the dishes and ingredients to their correct country and origin and win a prize!Click here for a full schedule of events, and make sure to stop by our booth and catch these great lectures by out very own Dr.s Davis, Hoelscher, and Lewis!American Animals: Culture, History, and Society (3:00 p.m. - 3:40 p.m. Parlin 203)Associate Professor Janet Davis will explore American history of animals from multiple vantages: from clashes between Native Americans and English colonists over wandering cows and pigs, to the rise of pet-keeping as a business in today’s world.Remembering America’s Past – and Forgetting It, Too (3:00 p.m. - 3:40 p.m. Parlin 204)
5 Takes on Women and Bicycles
Back in 2004, inspired by my friend Emily Wismer, I traded my car for a bicycle, and eight years, six cities, and thousands of miles later, I think it's safe to say that I think riding a bike is pretty sweet. I'm rarely stuck in a traffic jam, I get front-row parking pretty much wherever I go, and hey, I get me some exercise and a little daily sunshine, too, especially here in Austin. In these enlightened times, it's generally pretty awesome to be a lady cyclist, too, especially with more and more shops hiring female mechanics (thank you, Ozone and The Peddler!), more companies making women-specific gear, and folks like Mia Birk, Georgena Terry, and Shelley Jackson leading the charge in making cycling more accessible to everyone, including women.
But gender and bicycles can easily become complicated, too, and not just in a turn-of-the-century dress reform kind of way. Back in the 1980s and 90s, technophiles like Donna Haraway argued that technology was going to be the great equalizer, as though somehow the right combination of wheels and gears and metal tubing could erase centuries of gender inequality. As far as bikes go, that hasn't happened - not yet, anyway. But, with more and more lady cyclists moving into what has so far been a male-dominated technological domain, the bicycle is beginning to raise some questions about gender, female sexuality, and what it means to be a lady on two wheels. Below, five very interesting answers to these questions.1. Elly Blue, Taking the LaneElly Blue is a bike activist in Portland who writes about - and advocates for - the need for more bike-friendly (and less misogynistic) cities. Her zine, Taking the Lane, draws clear parallels between being a cyclist in a car's world and being a woman in a man's world. In its very first issue, Taking the Lane ranges from road rage and grassroots organizing to fat bias and the condescension women often have to endure from male bike shop employees. Blue argues that women cyclists as both women and cyclists are doubly discriminated against, and that only by working together can we end both gender and transportation inequality. I find her writing style intense and thought-provoking and her militancy refreshing - especially since so many of her examples hit very close to home.2. Peter Zheutlin's Around the World on Two Wheels and Gillian Klempner Willman's The New Woman: Annie LondonderryGillian Willman's film builds on Peter Zheutlin's long-awaited Around the World on Two Wheels, which tells the story of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to bike around the world. Back at the turn of the last century, Annie Londonderry (who was actually Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, a 23-year old Jewish mother of 3 from Boston), rode a Columbia bicycle around the world in 15 months - and made $5000 in the process. The whole thing was a publicity stunt, but Willman and Zheutlin both focus less on that than on the impact Londonderry's journey had on women's rights. She left her home, husband, and kids. She wore pants. She sold pictures of herself. She rented space on her body and her bike to advertisers. She rode a bicycle, and she worked it. Capitalism, feminism, and bicycles all in one place. The horror!3. Rebecca "Lambchop" ReillyPortable Portrait: REBECCA REILLY (1995) from Rachel Strickland on Vimeo.Rebecca Reilly is the stuff of legend. Not only was she a female courier in the 1990s when there were barely any female couriers to speak of, a fierce fixed-gear rider by many (many) accounts, and a woman who insisted she only wanted to be treated the same as a man; she also spent eight years traveling around the United States, working as a courier in Chicago, Houston, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, DC, Boston, and New York, and collecting hundreds of oral histories from the couriers she met along the way. In 2000, she compiled many of these stories into Nerves of Steel, an incredible 300-page rollercoaster ride through the US bike messenger scene in the 90s. The above video is from Rachel Strickland's Portable Effects project; I could talk for hours about the relationship between bicycles and femininity in it. (I've written a little more extensively about Reilly here.)4. The Dropout's Bike Taxi Babes calendar
Back in January 2010, I managed to sneak into a photo shoot for The Dropout's first bike pin-up spread, and being a good (if idealistic) feminist, I spent the rest of that semester trying to fit that night - and the photographs that eventually made it into the magazine - into some semblance of third-wave feminism. It was Elly, actually, who pointed out that not every pin-up has to be feminist, and bikes don't automatically lead to feminist liberation. (Thanks, Elly.) With that in mind, I'm fascinated by The Dropout's latest project, the Bike Taxi Babes. As far as I know, the ladies pictured are all pedicabbers, and the calendar has more of the flavor of burlesque than pornography; The Dropout is a pedicab-community organ, and the project is a resolutely for-profit venture. I can't even begin to talk about how this complicates what it means to be a female cyclist.5. Rick Darge's bike ♥bike ♥ from Rick Darge on Vimeo.Rick Darge is a cinematographer who has worked with, oh, I don't know, LCD Soundsystem, Fritos, and Dell, and his video is pretty incredible in its ability to tell a story and capture complex emotions without the main character uttering a single word. The Robert Johnston is a nice touch, too. But while I love this video for its composition, the one thing that truly stands out to me is how adolescently girly it is: how young and innocent Dee looks, how much the camera loves her sweet eyes and hair, how her delicate lace and lingerie contrast with her black socks and Vans. Her love for her bicycle, like Dee herself, is stuck somewhere between childhood innocence and full-grown lady. So what, does she have to cast off all two-wheeled childish things to become a woman? I guess it is a bit tricky to ride a bike in heels...... or is it?