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)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
General
Nostalgia
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Route 66
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Tourism
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
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