Roadside Memories

As a follow up to his well received first poetry book My Times in Rhymes, Paul goes beyond his own personal experiences to add a whole new dimension to his poems. He combines his thoughts and his life experiences with that of others to creaate a new outlook on love, life and the world around us.

Pictorial history of the gasoline station in the United States and details about many of the companies which punctuated the roadsides with their buildings, including the Standard Oil, Cities, Mobil, Phillips, Gulf, Shell, Texaco, and Conoco.

This work is a study of roadside crosses in which the author presents the history of these unique commemoratives and their relationship to contemporary memorial culture.

Americana Readside Memories Whether cruising down the streets of Anytown, U.S.A., or taking the family on a cross-country ride, the highway and its many sights, sounds, and smells are part of the culture and collective memory of generations of Americans. This book brings together the defining elements of our love affair with the open road. It includes Tim Steil's entertaining trip along America's Main Street, the storied Route 66 that once stretched in glorious excess from Chicago to LA. Michael Witzel takes us back to a time and place where service-with-a-smile meant something, presenting a nostalgic look at the places where travelers filled their cars with gas and their bellies with good grub. The gas stations and drive-in restaurants of old offered their own special charm and personality, a far cry from the cookie-cutter feel of today's strip malls and "convenience stores." These icons of roadside America are colorfully illustrated here with vintage ads and memorabilia along with photos of the aging landmarks today.

Despite the ubiquity of automobility, the reality of automotive death is hidden from everyday view. There are accident blackspots all over the roads that we use and go past every day but the people that have died there or been injured are not marked, unless by homemade shrines and personal memorialization. Nowhere on the planet is this practice as densely actioned as in the United States. Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside shrines—or road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family and friends have died in automobile accidents, either while driving cars or motorcycles or being hit by cars as pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Prevalent for decades in Latin America and in the American Southwest, roadside car crash shrines are now present throughout the U.S. and around the world. Some are simply small white crosses, almost silent markers of places of traumatic death. Others are elaborate collections of objects, texts, and materials from all over the map culturally and physically, all significantly brought together not in the home or in a cemetery but on the roadside, in drivable public space—a space where private individuals perform private identities alongside each other in public, and where these private mobilities sometimes collide with one another in traumatic ways that are negotiated in roadside shrines. This book touches on something many of us have seen, but few have explored intellectually.

Quoting God charts the many ways in which media reports religion news, how media uses the quoted word to describe lived faith, and how media itself influences--and is influenced by--religion in the public square. The volume intentionally brings together the work of academics, who study religion as a crucial factor in the construction of identity, and the work of professional journalists, who regularly report on religion in an age of instant and competitive news. This book clearly demonstrates that the relationship between media culture and spiritual culture is foundational and multi-directional; that the relationship between news values and religion in political life is influential; and that the relationship amongst modernity, belief, and journalism is pivotal.

Grassroots memorials have become major areas of focus during times of trauma, danger, and social unrest. These improvised memorial assemblages continue to display new and more dynamic ways of representing collective and individual identities and in doing so reveal the steps that shape the national memories of those who struggle to come to terms with traumatic loss. This volume focuses on the hybrid quality of these temporary memorials as both monuments of mourning and as focal points for protest and expression of discontent. The broad range of case studies in this volume include anti-mafia shrines, Theo van Gogh’s memorial, September 11th memorials, March 11th shrines in Madrid, and Carlo Giuliani memorials in Genoa.