Books by "John Mabry Mathews"
7 books found
Documents and Readings in American Government: National and State, and Local
by John Mabry Mathews, Clarence Arthur Berdahl
1928
"The present volume is the outgrowth of the authors' experience over many years in teaching large college classes in American Government at the University of Illinois. This experience has demonstrated the need of a book of documents and readings to supplement the textbook, since the size of the class renders it impracticable, even in the best equipped libraries, to send the students to the books and documents from which the material has been selected. The volume covers the whole field of American government, national, state, and local, and is designed for use in connection with, and supplementary to, any of the standard texts now available in this field"--Unedited summary from book preface.
Motoring unmasks the forces that shape the American driving experience--commercial, aesthetic, cultural, mechanical--as it takes a timely look back at our historically unconditional love of motor travel. Focusing on recreational travel between 1900 and 1960, John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle cover dozens of topics related to drivers, cars, and highways and explain how they all converge to uphold that illusory notion of release and rejuvenation we call the "open road." Jakle and Sculle have collaborated on five previous books on the history, culture, and landscape of the American road. Here, with an emphasis on the driver's perspective, they discuss garages and gas stations, roadside tourist attractions, freeways and toll roads, truck stops, bus travel, the rise of the convenience store, and much more. All the while, the authors make us think about aspects of driving that are often taken for granted: how, for instance, the many lodging and food options along our highways reinforce the connection between driving and "freedom" and how, by enabling greater speeds, highway engineers helped to stoke motorists' "blessed fantasy of flight." Although driving originally celebrated freedom and touted a common experience, it has increasingly become a highly regulated, isolated activity. The motive behind America's first embrace of the automobile--individual prerogative--still substantially obscures this reality. "Americans did not have the automobile imposed on them," say the authors. Jakle and Sculle ask why some of the early prophetic warnings about our car culture went unheeded and why the arguments of its promoters resonated so persuasively. Today, the automobile is implicated in any number of environmental, even social, problems. As the wisdom of our dependence on automobile travel has come into serious question, reassessment of how we first became that way is more important than ever.
The American picture postcard debuted around the start of the twentieth century, creating an enthusiasm for sending and collecting postcard art that continued for decades. As a form of popular culture, scenic postcards strongly influenced how Americans conceptualized both faraway and nearby places through portrayals of landscapes, buildings, and historic sites. In this gloriously illustrated history of the picture postcard in Illinois, John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle study a rich and diverse set of images that chronicle what Illinoisans considered attractive, intriguing, and memorable. They also discuss how messages written on postcards reveal the sender's personal interpretation of local geography and scenery. The most popularly depicted destination was Chicago, America's great boomtown.Its portraits are especially varied, showing off its high-rise architecture, its teeming avenues, and the vitality of its marketplaces and even slaughterhouses. Postcards featuring downstate locales, however, elaborated and reinforced stereotypes that divided the state, portraying the rest of Illinois as the counterpoint to Chicago's urban bustle. Scores of cards from Springfield, Peoria, Bloomington-Normal, Urbana-Champaign, Quincy, and Vandalia emphasize wide-open prairies, modest civic edifices, and folksy charm. The sense of dichotomy between Chicago and the rest of Illinois was, of course, a substantial fallacy, since the city's very prosperity depended upon the entire state's fertile farmlands, natural resources, and small industries. Jakle and Sculle follow this dialogue between urban Chicago and rural downstate as it is illustrated on two hundred vintage postcards, observing both their common conventions and their variety. They also discuss the advances in printing technology in the early 1900s that made mass appeal possible. Providing rich historical and geographical context, Picturing Illinois: Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo illustrates the picture postcard's significance in American popular culture and the unique ways in which Illinoisans pictured their world.