A lecture and documentary screening highlighting the significance of the Dixie Highway will take place April 21 at 4 p.m. in the auditorium of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries.
Tammy Ingram’s talk, “Driving Dixie: The Politics of Early Automobile Tourism,” will focus on the ways automobile tourism reshaped the physical and political landscapes of the South, and Georgia in particular, from the 1910s through the 1930s.
A reception and book signing will follow at 5 p.m.
Ingram’s book, Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930, is the first to examine the largely forgotten 6,000-mile network of roads that crisscrossed the South and Midwest from Lake Michigan to Miami Beach. Published in 2014, the book has been awarded an Excellence in Research Award by the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council and the 2015 Malcolm Bell Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award by the Georgia Historical Society.
At 6:30 p.m., Down the Dixie Highway, a one-hour documentary produced by Georgia Public Broadcasting will be screened followed by a question-and-answer session with filmmakers and producers.
