Dixie Highway

Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930 by Tammy Ingram

At the turn of the twentieth century, good highways eluded most Americans and nearly all southerners. 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.