Getting Your ‘Kicks’?: An Investigation of Historic Route 66 in Petrified Forest National Park

Author(s): Hunter W Crosby

Year: 2018

Summary

It is nearly impossible to consider the heyday of traditional Americana, waxing nostalgic about the "good old days" of early travel and tourism in the United States, without thinking about Route 66. Sean Scanlan writes that "…memory and history are separate categories of thought—the former a system of retrieval, the latter a discourse on retrieval—and that nostalgia is the sorry cousin of various ways of retrieving a memory". This begs the question— what was Route 66 really like during its glory days? I will use nostalgia theory with special attention paid to "rosy retrospection bias" along with several forms of data to examine nostalgia-based assumptions of what "should be" in the archaeological record against the realities of what is. Ultimately, I hope to provide new insights into how Americans imagine a time (1926-1956) and pilgrimage that marks a Great American Experience that continues to resonate with us today. 

Cite this Record

Getting Your ‘Kicks’?: An Investigation of Historic Route 66 in Petrified Forest National Park. Hunter W Crosby. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441475)

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Keywords

Temporal Keywords
1920-1960

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 1093