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| Are We There Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (Cultureamerica) | 
 enlarge | Author: Susan Sessions Rugh
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $18.78
You Save: $11.17 (37%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (3 reviews)
Sales Rank: 271366
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0700615881
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.92
EAN: 9780700615889
ASIN: 0700615881
Publication Date: June 12, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
When TV celebrity Dinah Shore sang "See the USA in your Chevrolet," 1950s America took her to heart. Every summer, parents piled the kids in the back seat, threw the luggage in the trunk, and took to the open highway. Chronicling this innately American ritual, Susan Rugh presents a cultural history of the American middle-class family vacation from 1945 to 1973, tracing its evolution from the establishment of this summer tradition to its decline.The first in-depth look at post - World War II family travel, Rugh's study recounts how postwar prosperity and mass consumption - abetted by paid vacation leave, car ownership, and the new interstate highway system - forged the ritual of the family road trip and how that ritual became entwined with what it meant to be an American. With each car a safe haven from the Cold War, vacations became a means of strengthening family bonds and educating children in parental values, national heritage, and citizenship.Rugh's history looks closely at specific types of trips, from adventures in the Wild West to camping vacations in national parks to summers at Catskill resorts. It also highlights changing patterns of family life, such as the relationship between work and play, the increase in the number of working women, and the generation gap of the sixties.Distinctively, Rugh also plumbs NAACP archives and travel guides marketed specifically to blacks to examine the racial boundaries of road trips in light of segregated public accommodations that forced many black families to sleep in cars - a humiliation that helped spark the civil rights struggle. In addition, she explains how the experience of family camping predisposed baby boomers toward a strong environmental consciousness.Until the 1970s recession ended three decades of prosperity and the traditional nuclear family began to splinter, these family vacations were securely woven into the fabric of American life. Rugh's book allows readers to relive those wondrous wanderings across the American landscape and to better understand how they helped define an essential aspect of American culture. Notwithstanding the rueful memories of discomforts and squabbles in a crowded car, those were magical times for many of the nation's families.
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| Customer Reviews:
 more like a business trip than a vacation November 20, 2008
With its snappy title, I expected a lively, conversational work in the spirit of Erma Bombeck or Dave Barry, perhaps with a few celebrity reminiscences or interviews with retired tourist attraction operators mixed in with a broad discussion of the vacation trends that waxed and waned during the period in question (1947-1973). What we have instead is a college history professor who has taken her unedited research notes and thrown them on the page. There is not even the most rudimentary attempt to shape a narrative - reading this is literally like reading 184 pages of footnotes, with all the tedium that implies.
 Poor D N Roth ! September 11, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Poor D N Roth, book critic wannabe, cannot enjoy this lovely nostaglic trip of a book because said D N Roth is too anal and riddled with OCD. Shame !
Missing so much with a stick up the arse!
Rife with Errors, But Not without Value August 14, 2008
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
Although I found Rugh's summaries of complaint letters received by the NAACP and National Park Service to be captivating, her book is riddled with minor errors, inconsistencies in argument, claims beyond the scope of her compiled evidence (mostly secondary sources), and outright incorrect citing of sources. These errors overshadow the amount of decent research performed.
The book is not well-edited. Rugh confuses the plural with the singular as "camping materials" becomes "it" (p. 144) or "park operators" becomes "he" (p. 148). She becomes lost in her summaries as sources seem to overlap and stories and pronouns become confused (see pp. 157-158 in her discussion of the Gilmans' resort and mixing it up with Ryan's narrative). She states that Sinking Spring Farm is in Rockport, Indiana, when it is actually located near Hodgenville, Kentucky (p. 54). The New England Thruway becomes "The New England thruway" (p. 75). She refers to "The phenomenon of 30,000 motels" (p. 36) when just mentioning that the number of motels peaked at 51,000 (p. 35). These types of errors pepper her book.
Her arguments are not consistent through the book. At the beginning, she is careful to state that the family ideal in the 1950s did not really exist according to historians (p. 6), but then says she focused on families that fit the ideal (p. 11) and then makes assumptions about postwar reality based upon advertising, and other popular culture (see pp. 125-126 for an example regarding camping). She draws all sorts of generalizations about reality from advertising and popular culture when such research should have been presented as how businesses viewed the needs of the public (i.e. not a portrayal of what exactly was occurring in families).
At one point, she refers to how the United States became a multicultural mosaic in the 1970s, rather than a country defined by cartographers as a collection of regions (p. 54). However, later in the book, Rugh relies on defining various regions of the United States, sometimes poorly (see pp. 156-157 for an example: "Visitors were usually from the Midwest, but less than a third came from Minnesota, with 20 percent from Illinois, 18 percent from Iowa and about 5 percent each from Indiana, Missouri and Nebraska." Compare p. 74 where Indiana is in the Midwest. How does she define these regions?). The layers of inconsistency are confusing to the reader.
Her terms are ill-defined, such as "class" and even "vacation." Her "middle class" (the class she decided to focus on) included herself, the daughter of a Harvard-educated father, a Radcliffe alum, and a woman whose family could afford a two-week excursion including airfare and rented car. At different times in the book she both accepts and dismisses weekend trips as part of her focus (i.e. writes of people traveling from New York City to the Catskills by expressway, but then laments how weekend trips are supposedly becoming more common nowadays). This lack of definition hampers her discussion, especially when she's trying to answer questions as broad as: "How did this madness get started?" (p. 2).
Throughout the book, her claims are inadequately supported by the cites provided. She makes the claim that more middle-class Americans could afford to go to Europe at some point after her "Golden Age" (whenever that was--the exact end of the study period is unclear) and cites a 1954 Gallup poll, a 1962 outdoor recreation survey, and the entire book, "The Conquest of Cool" by Thomas Frank (p. 6). The statement that "...as a result of intense competition from the Arab oil embargo, by 1980 gas stations found they no longer needed maps to attract motorists" is "supported" by a book on road map art and a publication by Rand McNally on free road maps dated "ca. 1972-1973" (p. 45). She uses a single, three-page article from the Ladies' Home Journal to argue that vacations came to be viewed as a threat to the family (pp. 178-179). Even the number of interviews and other transcripts used to characterize the postwar road trip was woefully small for her subsequent conclusions (especially when considering that millions of surviving baby boomers provide an accessible pool of valuable memories). The list of broad claims being flimsily supported by their associated cites is quite long.
And then there are cites that are completely wrong altogether. In another mention of the Arab oil embargo's negative effect, she uses a 1946 Gallup Poll (p. 12, Note 25). The claim that "The rapid resumption of pleasure travel surprised everyone in its scale" is supported by President Truman's travel logs (p. 3, Note 5). "A postwar map and guide" was actually published during the war circa 1942 (p. 59, Note 39). Perhaps the most frustrating is a cite that refers to pages of the 1962 outdoor recreation survey that cover sporting events, rather than a host of statistics regarding national park visitation and camper registration (p. 120, Note 6).
Basing her claims in more primary sources would have helped this book tremendously. This is why her research of the letters sent to the NAACP and NPS were the best parts of the book (her review of oral histories regarding Minnesota resorts a close second). She ignored data that would have helped strengthen or amend her claims regarding this era of travel (most notably U.S. Department of Transportation's Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey) and instead opted for easier, weaker ways out (newspaper articles, advertising, popular culture, etc.). In short, the book was very disappointing due to all of the errors and concerns I have mentioned here.
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