Dixie Highway
May 10, 2015
Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930 by Tammy Ingram At…
Tammy Ingram
Dr. Tammy L. Ingram received her PhD from Yale University in 2007. Before coming to the College of Charleston in 2011, she served as the Kirk Visiting Scholar at Agnes Scott College and as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Southern Studies at the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Dr. Ingram’s first book, Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in March 2014. It is the first book about the construction of the nation’s very first interstate highway system, a largely forgotten 6000-mile network of roads that looped from Lake Michigan to Miami Beach and back up again. The book examines the literal and figurative linkages between urban and rural communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and shows how the frenzied public relations campaign to build the Dixie Highway helped to shape modern transportation policy. By looking at the tensions embedded in the formation of that policy, Dixie Highway helps to explain some of the partisan debates that surround infrastructure projects today. The book has received an Excellence in Research Award from the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council and was named a 2014 Book of Interest by the Business History Conference. Dr. Ingram is currently working on a new book project titled The Wickedest City in America: Sex, Race, and Organized Crime in the Jim Crow South, which examines the intersections among criminal enterprise, government corruption, challenges to the sexual and racial order, and ideas about modernization and urbanization in the New South. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Ingram has contributed essays and op-eds to publications such as H-Net, the Huffington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Like the Dew. Education PhD, Yale University, 2007 MA, Yale University, 2003 MA, University of Georgia, 2000 BA, University of Georgia, 1998 Research Interests 19th and 20th Century U.S. Political and Social History Post-Civil War Southern History Rural and Urban History Film and History Courses Taught The South Since 1865 Film and History The History of Crime in America The U.S. Since 1945 Race and Rebellion in the U.S. Dr. Ingram also teaches graduate seminars on the Modern South, U.S. Politics, and Gender and Sexuality.
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