Search results for ""Author T. Lindsay Baker""

From its designation in 1926 to the rise of the interstates nearly sixty years later, Route 66 was, in John Steinbeck’s words, America’s Mother Road, carrying countless travelers the 2,400 miles between Chicago and Los Angeles. Whoever they were—adventurous motorists or Dustbowl migrants, troops on military transports or passengers on buses, vacationing families or a new breed of tourists—these travelers had to eat. The story of where they stopped and what they found, and of how these roadside offerings changed over time, reveals twentieth-century America on the move, transforming the nation’s cuisine, culture, and landscape along the way. Author T. Lindsay Baker, a glutton for authenticity, drove the historic route—or at least the 85 percent that remains intact—in a four-cylinder 1930 Ford station wagon. Sparing us the dust and bumps, he takes us for a spin along Route 66, stopping to sample the fare at diners, supper clubs, and roadside stands and to describe how such venues came and went—even offering kitchen-tested recipes from historic eateries en route. Start-ups that became such American fast-food icons as McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, Steak ’n Shake, and Taco Bell feature alongside mom-and-pop diners with flocks of chickens out back and sit-down restaurants with heirloom menus. Food-and-drink establishments from speakeasies to drive-ins share the right-of-way with other attractions, accommodations, and challenges, from the Whoopee Auto Coaster in Lyons, Illinois, to the piles of “chat” (mining waste) in the Tri-State District of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, to the perils of driving old automobiles over the Jericho Gap in the Texas Panhandle or Sitgreaves Pass in western Arizona. Describing options for the wealthy and the not-so-well-heeled, from hotel dining rooms to ice cream stands, Baker also notes the particular travails African Americans faced at every turn, traveling Route 66 across the decades of segregation, legal and illegal. So grab your hat and your wallet (you’ll probably need cash) and come along for an enlightening trip down America’s memory lane—a westward tour through the nation’s heartland and history, with all the trimmings, via Route 66.

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Before the development of the first self-governing windmill, settlement of the upland areas of the American West was almost impossible. Windmills were needed to pump underground water to the surface. As soon as their design and manufacture had been perfected, the mills became the most prominent feature of the American landscape, not only in the western two-thirds of the nation but also in the East and particularly in the Middle East. Besides supplying the needs of farmers and ranchers, windmills performed such tasks as pumping water to the roofs of New York tenements, cleaning our mine shafts and ships' bilges, and providing water for the boilers of locomotives.This guide to America's windmills is both a complete general history of turbine-wheel mills and an identification guide to the 112 most common models, which still dot the landscape today. With this guide a traveler or enthusiast crossing the plains and prairies of North American can identify virtually every farm-style windmill that he or she can see with a good pair of binoculars. The guide also serves as a handbook for the restoration of antique mills.In his lively narrative T. Lindsay Baker clearly explains the technical evolution of the mills and shares a wealth of windmill folklore. Among the 376 illustrations are unpublished historical photographs, long-lost engravings, field photographs by the author, and detailed India-ink drawings of the 112 most popular designs. Appendices identify all the known windmill manufacturers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico and all the known windmill models from the 1850s to the present day. The comprehensive bibliography is the first published list of source materials on the history of wind-power utilization.

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By the time Route 66 received its official numerical designation in 1926, picture postcards had become popular travel souvenirs. At the time, these postcards with colorful images served as advertisements for roadside businesses. While cherished by collectors, these postcard depictions do not always reflect reality. They often present instead a view enhanced for promotional purposes. Portrait of Route 66 lets us see for the first time the actual photographs from which the postcards were made, and in describing how the production process worked, introduces us to an extraordinary archival collection, adding new history to this iconic road. The Curt Teich Postcard Archives, held at the Lake County Discovery Museum in Wauconda, Illinois, contains one of the nation's largest collections of Route 66 images, including thousands of job files for postcards produced by Curt Teich and Company of Chicago. T. Lindsay Baker combed these files to choose the best examples of postcards and their accompanying photographs not only to reflect well-known sites along the route but also to demonstrate the relationships between photographs and their resulting postcards. The photographs show the reality of the locations that customers sometimes wanted ""improved"" for aesthetic purposes in creating the postcards. Such alterations included removing utility poles or automobile traffic and rendering overcast skies partly cloudy. This book will interest historians of art and design as well as the worldwide audiences of Route 66 aficionados and postcard collectors. For its mining of an invaluable and little-known photographic archive and depiction of high-quality photographs that have not been seen before, Portrait of Route 66 will be irresistible to all who are interested in American history and culture.

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From the earliest days of European settlement, Americans have cherished the sight of a windmill - an instantly recognizable feature of the American landscape. Boasting nearly two hundred striking images, this book is the first devoted to photographs illustrating historic wind machines throughout North America.T. Lindsay Baker, an expert historian on windmills, has written about wind-power history for twenty-five years. His album contains historic images captured by professional windmiller B. H. ""Tex"" Burdick and from corporate archives of windmill manufacturers. It depicts windmills in a wide range of settings and uses - not only on ranches and farms but also alongside railroads, in industry, and even in urban areas.The photos chosen for this book illustrate windmill manufacture, distribution, and use in all regions of the United States, with an emphasis on the Great Plains. They take us into the factories to show how commercial windmills were mass-produced and marketed - and also into rural America to show how inventive individuals designed their own homemade wind machines.An introduction by photography historian John Carter provides an overview of the importance of windmills in rural life and Americans' compulsion for photographing them.

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