Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The King's Best Highway

The King's Best Highway

Jaffe, Eric

Paperback

Transportation GeneralRegional: Middle AtlanticRegional: New England

ISBN10: 1416586156
ISBN13: 9781416586159
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: May 11 2013
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
A VIVID AND FASCINATING LOOK AT AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH THE PRISM OF THE COUNTRY'S MOST STORIED HIGHWAY, THE BOSTON POST ROAD

During its evolution from Indian trails to modern interstates, the Boston Post Road, a system of over-land routes between New York City and Boston, has carried not just travelers and mail but the march of American history itself. Eric Jaffe captures the progress of people and culture along the road through four centuries, from its earliest days as the king of England's best highway to the current era.

Centuries before the telephone, radio, or Internet, the Boston Post Road was the primary conduit of America's prosperity and growth. News, rumor, political intrigue, financial transactions, and personal missives traveled with increasing rapidity, as did people from every walk of life.

From post riders bearing the alarms of revolution, to coaches carrying George Washington on his first presidential tour, to railroads transporting soldiers to the Civil War, the Boston Post Road has been essential to the political, economic, and social development of the United States.

Continuously raised, improved, rerouted, and widened for faster and heavier traffic, the road played a key role in the advent of newspapers, stagecoach travel, textiles, mass-produced bicycles and guns, commuter railroads, automobiles--even Manhattan's modern grid. Many famous Americans traveled the highway, and it drew the keen attention of such diverse personages as Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, P. T. Barnum, J. P. Morgan, and Robert Moses.

Eric Jaffe weaves this entertaining narrative with a historian's eye for detail and a journalist's flair for storytelling. A cast of historical figures, celebrated and unknown alike, tells the lost tale of this road.

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