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280 Suggesłions for Further Reading

ance, these ghost writers have done their job admirably; they allow their “author” to speak unmistakably in his own voice, to ramble, to “enthuse,” to pat himself on the back, and to moralize in his own unghostable fashion.

The motel, still unchronicled except in movies, novels, and on the television screen, must be traced through the statistics of government agencies and the publications of professional asso-ciations. Valuable sources are architectural planbooks, like Motels, Hotels, Restaurants and Bars: An Architectural Record Book (F. W. Dodge Corp., N.Y., 1953).

On the history of museums, a useful starting point is George V Brown Goode, “Museum History and Museums of History,” in Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report . . . 1897, Report of the U.S. National Museum, Pt. II (Washington, D.C., 1901), pp. 65-81. See Walter Pach’s The Art Museum in America (1948); and, on the relation of wealthy collectors to the museums, Alinę B. Saarinen’s amusing, anecdotal The Proud Possessors (1958). Some of the profounder aesthetic implications of the rise of museums and of photography are explored again in Andre Malraux’s magnificent Voices of Silence: Man and His Art (1953), especially Part I, “Museum without Walls,” and Part III, “The Creative Process.” On the rise and significance of world fairs, see Merle Curti’s suggestive article, “America at the World Fairs, 1851-1893,” American Historical Review, LV (July, 1950), 833-856. For a generał survey of museum history one must still turn to the article in Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th ed.).

While sailing ships, steam navigation, canals, turnpikes, wagon trails, and railroads have attracted the expert interest of many scholars, the automobile and the airplane have yet attracted too few serious historians. John H. Morrison, History of American Steam Navigation (1903) and John L. Stover, American Railroads (Chicago History of American Civilization Series, 1960) offer admirable introductions. For wider implications of these older innovations, see George R. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (1951; Vol. IV in the valuable Rine-hart Economic History of the United States). Ali these subjects have, of course, attracted buffs and hobbyists; tbere have been a number of useful picture books.

The automobile is an epic subject; a panoramie history of the automobile could make a grand parable of modern America. The most useful works so far have been biographies or company histories, like Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company (1954) and Ford: Expansion and

Challenge (1957), which incidentally touch the social effects of the automobile. Roger Burlingame, in March of the Iron Men (1938), Engines of Democracy (1940) and Machines that Built America (1948), covers a broader subject, but hints the possi-bilities of morę narrowly focused works. Hints are also found in works of sociology like Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, Middle-town (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937). Social epics of America in the twentieth century, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (1938), and John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath (1939) inevitably give the automobile a leading role; they probably remain the best expositions of its importance for a futurę historian.

The history of motor highways and highway practice is im-portant as a chronicie of the man-made motorist's landscape, a major episode in the homogenization of our continent. A brief introduction is United States Public Roads Administration, Highway Practice in the United States of America (Washington, 1949).

The airplane and air travel generally are much in need of historical treatment. We have admirable histories of the Air Force in World War II, but we could still learn much from a scholarly and detailed history of civilian air travel and air tour-ism, compiled while pioneer figures are still alive. On the airline stewardess, see Joseph Kastner, “Joan Waltermire: Air Stewardess,” Life, X ( April 28, 1941), 102-112; and “Glamor Girls of the Air,” Life, XLV (August 25, 1958), 68-77. On the increas-ing speed of civilian air travel, see George A. W. Boehm, “The SST: Next Step to Instant Travel,” Fortune, LXIII (June, 1961), 159-164,238-244.

Tourist guides should be consulted as a source of what people have been told to look for, and what they like to think is im-portant. I have toured France and Italy with the constant com-panionship of Baedeker. Most large libraries have a collection of old Baedekers, which can be consulted with much amusement and profit. I have found Japan: The Official Guide (Japan Travel Bureau, Revised and Enlarged, Tokyo, 1957) especially helpful for underlining the characteristics of modern guide books, al-though it is almost useless for any other purpose. It is a carica-ture of the tourist guidebook, showing how a mechanical fol-lowing of the tourist-guide pattern can multiply trivia and omit matters of the greatest significance. The reader is told which items are considered “Important Cultural Property,” and is given the dimensions of every garden, pagoda, pałace, shrine, and tempie, but he is almost never told the meaning of social