The Growing Years: America's First Half Century

The world's biggest Zen garden?   If you're like me, you will be traveling across some stretch of the country this week in time for Thanksgiving. The week of Thanksgiving is known as the busiest travel period of the entire year, and for the majority of Americans en route to their turkey and stuffing dinners, their journeys will take them on the massive web of highways across the nation that make the United States look like a plate of grey spaghetti sometimes.  The interstate highway system that makes up much of this plate of gray spaghetti dates back to the 1950s, but the  history of roads in America dates back much further than this, even if these roads were quite primitive for much of their existence. From the beginning of European colonization throughout the colonial period, the highest quality roads were little more than long flat strips of dirt.   The weather greatly affected how these roads could be traversed. Any mid-level quantity of rainfall, and t...