Andrew Wood

Andrew Wood, professor of communication studies at San Jose State University, details a small part of Americana that’s becoming a thing of the past.

Dr. Wood has authored or co-authored books on internet communication, reality television, roadside Americana, and the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. His 2009 book City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Omnitopia received the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award from the Urban Communication Foundation. His latest co-authored book, Die ortlose stadt: Über die virtualisierung des urbanen, further examines the impact of new communications technology on urban life and human relationships. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in scholarly journals dedicated to media, performance, education, and rhetoric, and he has served on editorial boards for several regional and national journals. His teaching interests include architectural rhetoric, urban design, media analysis, and the humanities, and he is committed to helping globalize his department and campus. He has led student groups to Austria, China, Finland, and Taiwan (and he has facilitated side trips to Estonia, Russia, and Sweden), and he is a Fulbright Scholar who taught at Belarusian State University in 2015

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Grand Motel

The mid-1970s Holiday Inn slogan, “The best surprise is no surprise,” may have reflected a comforting predictability in road travel, but it also signaled a decline in one of its greatest pleasures: being in a place very different from home. Before long, backlit plastic replaced the Holiday Inn’s…

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.