Emergence of the Hollywood film studios and films produced within a 30-mile radius of Hollywood with trains and trolleys prominently highlighted.

Steam–powered locomotives helped bring people across the West but they also brought their share of problems. Traveling through enclosed tunnels or past the tall buildings of cities, the smoke from steam engines could be dangerous, even deadly. The story of electric trains is the story of the search for a better way. Electrically powered trains and trolleys helped build cities like Los Angeles. They let people live in new places, even far from where they worked. They were fast and efficient and led to some of the most modern trains on earth.

Climb aboard for a visual road trip across the American Southwest, following famous Route 66 and the trains of the Santa Fe and BNSF Railways. Filled with spectacular photography and engaging text, Route 66 Railway explores the relationship between the "Route of the Warbonnets" and the "Mother Road" through mountains, deserts, forests, cities and quirky towns. Thrill to colorful diesel locomotives and vintage steam trains as they roll past cafes, motor courts, tourist traps, railroad stations, neon signs, and much more.

The Story of Hollywood follows Hollywood from its dusty origins to its glorious rise to stardom. Lavishly illustrated with over 800 vintage images from the author's private collection, the book tells the complete story of Hollywood including its eventual decline and urban renewal. The Story of Hollywood brings new insights to readers with a passion for Hollywood and its place in the history of film, radio, and television.

Chicago's extensive transit system first started in 1859, when horsecars ran on rails in city streets. Cable cars and electric streetcars came next. Where new trolley car lines were built, people, businesses, and neighborhoods followed. Chicago quickly became a world-class city. At its peak, Chicago had over 3,000 streetcars and 1,000 miles of track--the largest such system in the world. By the 1930s, there were also streamlined trolleys and trolley buses on rubber tires. Some parts of Chicago's famous "L" system also used trolley wire instead of a third rail. Trolley cars once took people from the Loop to such faraway places as Aurora, Elgin, Milwaukee, and South Bend. A few still run today.

Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films. Pravadelli sets her analysis apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. Availing herself of the significant advances in film theory and modernity studies that have taken place since similar surveys first saw publication, she views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency.