The Highway Revolution, 1895-1925

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis The Highway Revolution, 1895-1925 by : Irving Brinton Holley (Jr.)

Download or read book The Highway Revolution, 1895-1925 written by Irving Brinton Holley (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the creation of a major American business, the highway construction industry. In the 1890s such an industry could scarcely be said to exist; within a generation, by the mid-1920s, highway building and all its ancillary activities had become one of the nation's greatest industries. This multi-faceted volume tells how the appallingly bad interurban highways of 19th-century USA came to be paved when the problem of financing was finally addressed after an extended campaign by diverse interest groups. Successive chapters deal with the early phases of waterbound crushed stone macadam, the hand tool and horse-powered machinery developed to build and maintain such highways, gradually giving place to steam powered machinery which lowered the cost and speeded the pace of construction. Other chapters recount the many difficult problems of contractors estimating costs to submit winning bids and learning to achieve quality production with such novel materials as asphalt and concrete. The volume fills a surprising void in the history of highway paving as very little has been written on the problems confronting highway contractors and the state engineers who supervised them. "Highly recommended." -- H.R. Grant, Clemson University, CHOICE Magazine "Drawing on extensive historical research in engineering journals, industry publications, and road-building manuals, Holley explores the multiple factors that comprised this highway revolution. Holley's account of the highway revolution is at its strongest when he is relating tales of technical innovation, pushed forward by highway workers seeking some labor-saving device." -- Michael R. Ferin, Technology and Culture

Henry Knox and the Revolutionary War Trail in Western Massachusetts

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Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786489650
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (864 download)

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Book Synopsis Henry Knox and the Revolutionary War Trail in Western Massachusetts by : Bernard A. Drew

Download or read book Henry Knox and the Revolutionary War Trail in Western Massachusetts written by Bernard A. Drew and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-01-23 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the winter of 1776, in one of the most amazing logistical feats of the Revolutionary War, Henry Knox and his teamsters transported cannons from Fort Ticonderoga through the sparsely populated Berkshires to Boston to help drive British forces from the city. This history documents Knox's precise route--dubbed the Henry Knox Trail--and chronicles the evolution of an ordinary Indian path into a fur corridor, a settlement trail, and eventually a war road. By recounting the growth of this important but under appreciated thoroughfare, this study offers critical insight into a vital Revolutionary supply route.

The Road Taken

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1632863626
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (328 download)

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Book Synopsis The Road Taken by : Henry Petroski

Download or read book The Road Taken written by Henry Petroski and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A renowned historian and engineer explores the past, present, and future of America's crumbling infrastructure. Acclaimed engineer and historian Henry Petroski explores our core infrastructure from both historical and contemporary perspectives, explaining how essential their maintenance is to America's economic health. Petroski reveals the genesis of the many parts of America's highway system--our interstate numbering system, the centerline that divides roads, and such taken-for-granted objects as guardrails, stop signs, and traffic lights--all crucial to our national and local infrastructure. A compelling work of history, The Road Taken is also an urgent clarion call aimed at American citizens, politicians, and anyone with a vested interest in our economic well-being. Physical infrastructure in the United States is crumbling, and Petroski reveals the complex and challenging interplay between government and industry inherent in major infrastructure improvement. The road we take in the next decade toward rebuilding our aging infrastructure will in large part determine our future national prosperity.

Dixie Highway

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Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469612992
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Dixie Highway by : Tammy Ingram

Download or read book Dixie Highway written by Tammy Ingram and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-03-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the twentieth century, good highways eluded most Americans and nearly all southerners. In their place, a jumble of dirt roads covered the region like a bed of briars. Introduced in 1915, the Dixie Highway changed all that by merging hundreds of short roads into dual interstate routes that looped from Michigan to Miami and back. In connecting the North and the South, the Dixie Highway helped end regional isolation and served as a model for future interstates. In this book, Tammy Ingram offers the first comprehensive study of the nation's earliest attempt to build a highway network, revealing how the modern U.S. transportation system evolved out of the hard-fought political, economic, and cultural contests that surrounded the Dixie's creation. The most visible success of the Progressive Era Good Roads Movement, the Dixie Highway also became its biggest casualty. It sparked a national dialogue about the power of federal and state agencies, the role of local government, and the influence of ordinary citizens. In the South, it caused a backlash against highway bureaucracy that stymied road building for decades. Yet Ingram shows that after the Dixie Highway, the region was never the same.

Getting Out of the Mud

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Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817319557
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis Getting Out of the Mud by : Martin T. Olliff

Download or read book Getting Out of the Mud written by Martin T. Olliff and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When roads were bad -- Alabamians become wide-awake to good roads -- State highways take the lead -- Peering beyond the state's boundaries: named trails and interstate highways -- Laying the foundation for a modern highway system -- Alabama administers its highway program

Car Country

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Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295804475
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (958 download)

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Book Synopsis Car Country by : Christopher W. Wells

Download or read book Car Country written by Christopher W. Wells and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most people in the United States, going almost anywhere begins with reaching for the car keys. This is true, Christopher Wells argues, because the United States is Car Country—a nation dominated by landscapes that are difficult, inconvenient, and often unsafe to navigate by those who are not sitting behind the wheel of a car. The prevalence of car-dependent landscapes seems perfectly natural to us today, but it is, in fact, a relatively new historical development. In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes readers on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing readers to see the everyday world in a completely new way. The result is a history that is essential for understanding American transportation and land-use issues today. Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48LTKOxxrXQ

An Alternative History of Bicycles and Motorcycles

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1498528805
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (985 download)

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Book Synopsis An Alternative History of Bicycles and Motorcycles by : Steven E. Alford

Download or read book An Alternative History of Bicycles and Motorcycles written by Steven E. Alford and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an account of two-wheeled vehicle development that challenges the common evolutionary model of development from the bicycle to the motorcycle. It examines the bicycle and motorcycle as material objects and focuses on the complex socio-political and economic convergences that produced the materials, which in turn shaped the vehicles’ appearance, function, and adoption by riders.

Hawai‘i’s Scenic Roads

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824854675
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Hawai‘i’s Scenic Roads by : Dawn E. Duensing

Download or read book Hawai‘i’s Scenic Roads written by Dawn E. Duensing and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hawai‘i's Scenic Roads examines a century of overland transportation from the Kingdom's first constitutional government until World War II, discovering how roads in the world's most isolated archipelago rivaled those on the U.S. mainland. Building Hawai‘i's roads was no easy feat, as engineers confronted a unique combination of circumstances: extreme isolation, mountainous topography, torrential rains, deserts, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and on Haleakalā, freezing temperatures. By investigating the politics and social processes that facilitated road projects, this study explains that foreign settlers wanted roads to "civilize" the Hawaiians and promote western economic development, specifically agriculture. Once sugar became the dominant driver in the economy, civic and political leaders turned their attention to constructing scenic roads. Viewed as "commercial enterprises," scenic byways became an essential factor in establishing tourism as Hawai‘i's "third crop" after sugar and pineapple. These thoroughfares also served as playgrounds for the islands' elite residents and wealthy visitors who could afford the luxury of carriage driving, and after 1900, motorcars. Duensing's provocative analysis of the 1924 Hawai‘i Bill of Rights reveals that roads played a critical role in redefining the Territory of Hawai‘i's status within the United States. Politicians and civic leaders focused on highway funding to argue that Hawai‘i was an "integral part of the Union," thus entitled to be treated as if it were a state. By accepting this "Bill of Rights," Congress confirmed the territory's claim to access federal programs, especially highway aid. Washington's subsequent involvement in Hawaii increased, as did the islands' dependence on the national government. Federal money helped the territory weather the Great Depression as it became enmeshed in New Deal programs and philosophy. Although primarily an economic protest, the Hawai‘i Bill of Rights was a crucial stepping stone on the path to eventual statehood in 1959. The core of this book is the intriguing tales of road projects that established the islands' most renowned scenic drives, including the Pali Highway, byways around Kīlauea Volcano, Haleakalā Highway, and the Hāna Belt Road. The author's unique approach provides a fascinating perspective for understanding Hawai‘i's social dynamics, as well as its political, environmental, and economic history.

Wheels of Her Own

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Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476652376
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (766 download)

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Book Synopsis Wheels of Her Own by : Carla R. Lesh

Download or read book Wheels of Her Own written by Carla R. Lesh and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-03-25 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women used automobiles as soon as they had access to them. Black, Indigenous, and White American women utilized the automobile to improve their quality of life and achieve greater freedom. These women shared unique concerns and common aims as they negotiated their way through a time when advocacy for social change was undergoing a resurgence. The years that brought the automobile to the United States, 1893-1929, also brought increased legal and social restrictions based on racism and gender stereotypes. For women the automobile was a useful tool as they worked to improve their quality of life. The automobile provided a means for Black, Indigenous, and White women to pull away from limitations and work toward greater freedom. Exploring these key issues and more, this book is a history and social exploration of women and the automobile during the early automotive era.

From Insight to Innovation

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262359685
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis From Insight to Innovation by : David P. Billington, Jr.

Download or read book From Insight to Innovation written by David P. Billington, Jr. and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The engineering ideas behind key twentieth-century technical innovations, from great dams and highways to the jet engine, the transistor, the microchip, and the computer. Technology is essential to modern life, yet few of us are technology-literate enough to know much about the engineering that underpins it. In this book, David P. Billington, Jr., offers accessible accounts of the key twentieth-century engineering innovations that brought us into the twenty-first century. Billington examines a series of engineering advances--from Hoover Dam and jet engines to the transistor, the microchip, the computer, and the internet--and explains how they came about and how they work.

Eating Up Route 66

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Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN 13 : 0806191627
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (61 download)

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Book Synopsis Eating Up Route 66 by : T. Lindsay Baker

Download or read book Eating Up Route 66 written by T. Lindsay Baker and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2022-10-13 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its designation in 1926 to the rise of the interstates nearly sixty years later, Route 66 was, in John Steinbeck’s words, America’s Mother Road, carrying countless travelers the 2,400 miles between Chicago and Los Angeles. Whoever they were—adventurous motorists or Dustbowl migrants, troops on military transports or passengers on buses, vacationing families or a new breed of tourists—these travelers had to eat. The story of where they stopped and what they found, and of how these roadside offerings changed over time, reveals twentieth-century America on the move, transforming the nation’s cuisine, culture, and landscape along the way. Author T. Lindsay Baker, a glutton for authenticity, drove the historic route—or at least the 85 percent that remains intact—in a four-cylinder 1930 Ford station wagon. Sparing us the dust and bumps, he takes us for a spin along Route 66, stopping to sample the fare at diners, supper clubs, and roadside stands and to describe how such venues came and went—even offering kitchen-tested recipes from historic eateries en route. Start-ups that became such American fast-food icons as McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, Steak ’n Shake, and Taco Bell feature alongside mom-and-pop diners with flocks of chickens out back and sit-down restaurants with heirloom menus. Food-and-drink establishments from speakeasies to drive-ins share the right-of-way with other attractions, accommodations, and challenges, from the Whoopee Auto Coaster in Lyons, Illinois, to the piles of “chat” (mining waste) in the Tri-State District of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, to the perils of driving old automobiles over the Jericho Gap in the Texas Panhandle or Sitgreaves Pass in western Arizona. Describing options for the wealthy and the not-so-well-heeled, from hotel dining rooms to ice cream stands, Baker also notes the particular travails African Americans faced at every turn, traveling Route 66 across the decades of segregation, legal and illegal. So grab your hat and your wallet (you’ll probably need cash) and come along for an enlightening trip down America’s memory lane—a westward tour through the nation’s heartland and history, with all the trimmings, via Route 66.

The Vortex

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Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 0822989808
Total Pages : 752 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

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Book Synopsis The Vortex by : Frank Uekotter

Download or read book The Vortex written by Frank Uekotter and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2024-04-18 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises—climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes—means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure, must be considered collectively if we are to stay afloat in what Uekötter describes as a vortex: a powerful metaphor for the flow of history, capturing the momentum and the many crosscurrents that swept people and environments along. His book invites us to look at environmental challenges from multiple perspectives, including all the twists and turns that have helped to create the mess we find ourselves in. Uekötter has written a world history for an age where things are falling apart: where we know what lies ahead and are equipped with the right tools—technological and otherwise—and plenty of experience to deal with environmental challenges, but somehow fail to get our affairs in order.

Deep South Dynasty

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Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817321101
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis Deep South Dynasty by : Kari A. Frederickson

Download or read book Deep South Dynasty written by Kari A. Frederickson and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Family biography as regional history -- Ascension. Becoming the Bankheads of Alabama ; A slaveholder's son in the postwar South, 1865-1885 ; "He was a getter, and he got" : the making of a New South congressman ; Establishing the new order ; Political challenges, 1904-1907 ; Roads and redemption ; Party men, city women -- Succession. New directions ; Senator from Alabama ; Burning bridges, taking chances ; Mr. Speaker ; "A good soldier in politics" : the last campaign ; At the crossroads.

Atlantic Automobilism

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Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1782383778
Total Pages : 768 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (823 download)

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Book Synopsis Atlantic Automobilism by : Gijs Mom

Download or read book Atlantic Automobilism written by Gijs Mom and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-12 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs ...

To Forgive Design

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674068890
Total Pages : 440 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis To Forgive Design by : Henry Petroski

Download or read book To Forgive Design written by Henry Petroski and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-30 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When planes crash, bridges collapse, and automobile gas tanks explode, we are quick to blame poor design. But Henry Petroski says we must look beyond design for causes and corrections. Known for his masterly explanations of engineering successes and failures, Petroski here takes his analysis a step further, to consider the larger context in which accidents occur. In To Forgive Design he surveys some of the most infamous failures of our time, from the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse and the toppling of a massive Shanghai apartment building in 2009 to Boston's prolonged Big Dig and the 2010 Gulf oil spill. These avoidable disasters reveal the interdependency of people and machines within systems whose complex behavior was undreamt of by their designers, until it was too late. Petroski shows that even the simplest technology is embedded in cultural and socioeconomic constraints, complications, and contradictions. Failure to imagine the possibility of failure is the most profound mistake engineers can make. Software developers realized this early on and looked outside their young field, to structural engineering, as they sought a historical perspective to help them identify their own potential mistakes. By explaining the interconnectedness of technology and culture and the dangers that can emerge from complexity, Petroski demonstrates that we would all do well to follow their lead.

Coconut Colonialism

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674270320
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis Coconut Colonialism by : Holger Droessler

Download or read book Coconut Colonialism written by Holger Droessler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history of globalization and empire at the crossroads of the Pacific. Located halfway between Hawai‘i and Australia, the islands of Samoa have long been a center of Oceanian cultural and economic exchange. Accustomed to exercising agency in trade and diplomacy, Samoans found themselves enmeshed in a new form of globalization after missionaries and traders arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the great powers of Europe and America competed to bring Samoa into their orbits, Germany and the United States eventually agreed to divide the islands for their burgeoning colonial holdings. In Coconut Colonialism, Holger Droessler examines the Samoan response through the lives of its workers. Ordinary Samoans—some on large plantations, others on their own small holdings—picked and processed coconuts and cocoa, tapped rubber trees, and built roads and ports that brought cash crops to Europe and North America. At the same time, Samoans redefined their own way of being in the world—what Droessler terms “Oceanian globality”—to challenge German and American visions of a global economy that in fact served only the needs of Western capitalism. Through cooperative farming, Samoans contested the exploitative wage-labor system introduced by colonial powers. The islanders also participated in ethnographic shows around the world, turning them into diplomatic missions and making friends with fellow colonized peoples. Samoans thereby found ways to press their own agendas and regain a degree of independence. Based on research in multiple languages and countries, Coconut Colonialism offers new insights into the global history of labor and empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400888956
Total Pages : 785 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis The Rise and Fall of American Growth by : Robert J. Gordon

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of American Growth written by Robert J. Gordon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue unabated, and demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated. Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government, and that we must find new solutions. A critical voice in the most pressing debates of our time, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.