From the first “Mom & Pop” stops to the truck stops built by oil companies, to today’s travel plazas and turnpike stations, this is the first in-depth history of America’s truck stops as it departed from the gas station and expanded with the Interstate system and prosperity in America. The huge variety of truck stops across America are well documented through vintage black and white and color photographs, as well as vintage advertising and other memorabilia.

Remember the simpler days before interstates when there was no such thing as a fast-food restaurant? After driving along a two-lane highway all day long and wanting to pick a place to eat, your mother would say, "Look for a place where all the trucks are stopped!" The trucks have all stopped at The All-American Truck Stop Cookbook, which contains more than 250 favorite truck stop recipes of the three million men and women who drive the 18-wheelers that keep America rolling. In addition, the book pays homage to the romance and true grit of trucking life. It includes colorful stories and scenic side trips through the history of America's trucking industry, including dozens of nostalgic photos of some of the early truckers and their rigs along with pictures of top truck stops of today and yesteryear. The All-American Truck Stop Cookbook is sure to please any fan of big rigs, life on the road, and great American food. So check your oil, fill it up, and get ready to dig into the delicious recipes and lore from beloved truck stops from across America.

Remember the simpler days before interstates when there was no such thing as a fast-food restaurant? After driving along a two-lane highway all day long and wanting to pick a place to eat, your mother would say, "Look for a place where all the trucks are stopped!" The trucks have all stopped at "The All-American Truck Stop Cookbook, which contains more than 250 favorite truck stop recipes of the three million men and women who drive the 18-wheelers that keep America rolling. In addition, the book pays homage to the romance and true grit of trucking life. It includes colorful stories and scenic side trips through the history of America's trucking industry, including dozens of nostalgic photos of some of the early truckers and their rigs along with pictures of top truck stops of today and yesteryear. "The All-American Truck Stop Cookbook is sure to please any fan of big rigs, life on the road, and great American food. So check your oil, fill it up, and get ready to dig into the delicious recipes and lore from beloved truck stops from across America.

A boy and his parents prepare breakfast at their truck stop for drivers of 18-wheelers, tankers, moving vans, and other vehicles, while Uncle Marty checks tires and makes repairs. Full color.

Situated at the crossroads of visual culture and consumerism, this essay collection examines visual merchandising as both a business and an art. It seeks to challenge that scholarly ambivalence that often celebrates the spectacle but denies the agenda of consumerism. The volume considers strategies in the imaging of selling from the mid nineteenth century to the present, in terms of the visual interaction that occurs between the commodity and the consumer and between body and space. Under the categories of Promotion, Product and Place, contributors to the volume examine the strategies in the presentation of retail goods and environments that range from print advertising to product design to store display and architecture. Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling is located directly at the nexus of business practice and cultural myth, where the spectator never loses sight of their status as buyer and the object of desire is always still a commodity.

A surreal, lyrical work of narrative nonfiction that portrays how the largest domestic oil discovery in half a century transformed a forgotten corner of the American West into a crucible of breakneck capitalism. As North Dakota became the nation's second-largest oil producer, Maya Rao set out in steel-toe boots to join a wave of drifters, dreamers, entrepreneurs, and criminals. With an eye for the dark, absurd, and humorous, Rao fearlessly immersed herself in their world to chronicle this modern-day gold rush, from its heady beginnings to OPEC's price war against the US oil industry. She rode shotgun with a surfer-turned-truck driver braving toxic fumes and dangerous roads, dined with businessmen disgraced during the financial crisis, and reported on everyone in between -- including an ex-con YouTube celebrity, a trophy wife mired in scandal, and a hard-drinking British Ponzi schemer--in a social scene so rife with intrigue that one investor called the oilfield Peyton Place on steroids. As the boom receded, a culture of greed and recklessness left troubling consequences for investors and longtime residents. Empty trailers and idle oil equipment littered the fields like abandoned farmsteads, leaving the pioneers who built this unlikely civilization to reckon with their legacy. Part Barbara Ehrenreich, part Upton Sinclair, Great American Outpost is a sobering exploration of twenty-first-century America that reads like a frontier novel.

“There’s nothing semi about Finn Murphy’s trucking tales of The Long Haul.”—Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair More than thirty years ago, Finn Murphy dropped out of college to become a long-haul trucker. Since then he’s covered more than a million miles as a mover, packing, loading, hauling people’s belongings all over America. In The Long Haul, Murphy recounts with wit, candor, and charm the America he has seen change over the decades and the poignant, funny, and often haunting stories of the people he encounters on the job.

This three-volume reference set explores the history, relevance, and significance of pop culture locations in the United States—places that have captured the imagination of the American people and reflect the diversity of the nation. Pop Culture Places: An Encyclopedia of Places in American Popular Culture serves as a resource for high school and college students as well as adult readers that contains more than 350 entries on a broad assortment of popular places in America. Covering places from Ellis Island to Fisherman's Wharf, the entries reflect the tremendous variety of sites, historical and modern, emphasizing the immense diversity and historical development of our nation. Readers will gain an appreciation of the historical, social, and cultural impact of each location and better understand how America has come to be a nation and evolved culturally through the lens of popular places. Approximately 200 sidebars serve to highlight interesting facts while images throughout the book depict the places described in the text. Each entry supplies a brief bibliography that directs students to print and electronic sources of additional information.