In small cities and towns across the United States, Main Street hotels were iconic institutions. They were usually grand, elegant buildings where families celebrated special occasions, local clubs and organizations honored achievements, and communities came together to commemorate significant events. Often literally at the center of their communities, these hotels sustained and energized their regions and were centers of culture and symbols of civic pride. America's main street hotels catered not only to transients passing through a locality, but also served local residents as an important kind of community center. This new book by John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, two leading experts on the nation_s roadside landscape, examines the crucial role that small- to mid-sized city hotels played in American life during the early decades of the twentieth century, a time when the automobile was fast becoming the primary mode of transportation. Before the advent of the interstate system, such hotels served as commercial and social anchors of developing towns across the country. America's Main Street Hotels provides a thorough survey of the impact these hotels had on their communities and cultures. The authors explore the hotels' origins, their traditional functions, and the many ups and downs they experienced throughout the early twentieth century, along with their potential for reuse now and in the future. The book details building types, layouts, and logistics; how the hotels were financed; hotel management and labor; hotel life and customers; food services; changing fads and designs; and what the hotels are like today. Brimming with photographs, this book looks at hotels from coast to coast. Its exploration of these important local landmarks will intrigue students, scholars, and general readers alike, offering a fascinating look back at that recent period in American history when even the smallest urban places could still look optimistically toward the future. John A. Jakle is emeritus professor of geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the head of research and education for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. He and Professor Jakle have coauthored The Gas Station in America; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; Signs in America_s Auto Age: Signatures of Landscape and Place; and Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture. With Jefferson S. Rogers, they are also coauthors of The Motel in America.

Here We Are . . . on Route 66 explores America’s fabled “Mother Road,” following Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica and offering an expert look back at vanished attractions—and sites still drawing thousands each year.

The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten. In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history. Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.” John A. Jakle is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the former head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. They have coauthored such books as America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Automobile Age; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; and The Gas Station in America.

The US Supreme Court’s 1937 decision in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, upholding the constitutionality of Washington State’s minimum wage law for women, had monumental consequences for all American workers. It also marked a major shift in the Court’s response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. In Making Minimum Wage, Helen J. Knowles tells the human story behind this historic case. West Coast Hotel v. Parrish pitted a Washington State hotel against a chambermaid, Elsie Parrish, who claimed that she was owed the state’s minimum wage. The hotel argued that under the concept of “freedom of contract,” the US Constitution allowed it to pay its female workers whatever low wages they were willing to accept. Knowles unpacks the legal complexities of the case while telling the litigants’ stories. Drawing on archival and private materials, including the unpublished memoir of Elsie’s lawyer, C. B. Conner, Knowles exposes the profound courage and resolve of the former chambermaid. Her book reveals why Elsie—who, in her mid-thirties was already a grandmother—was fired from her job at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, and why she undertook the outsized risk of suing the hotel for back wages. Minimum wage laws are “not an academic question or even a legal one,” Elinore Morehouse Herrick, the New York director of the National Labor Relations Board, said in 1936. Rather, they are “a human problem.” A pioneering analysis that illuminates the life stories behind West Coast Hotel v. Parrish as well as the case’s impact on local, state, and national levels, Making Minimum Wage vividly demonstrates the fundamental truth of Morehouse Herrick’s statement.

Millions of people traveling America's railroads and highways pass through Omaha, breaking for an overnight stay. At the end of the day, the traveler's experience is in the hands of transportation workers, hoteliers, and restaurateurs who promise comfort, food, and safety. Omaha's hospitality industry offerings ranged from the modest Scandinavian Young Women's Christian Association and the Hotel Harley bachelor lodgings to the lofty Fontenelle and Blackstone Hotels. The resilient Paxton has been a fixture since 1882. Visitors to Omaha took in the bright lights and culture, documenting their impressions on postcards that picture the city's hotels, restaurants, train depots, bridges, and weather events.