ORCID
Carl Friesenhahn: 0009-0007-5977-1773
Document Type
Article
Date
2024
Keywords
highways, modernity, texas, history, politics, culture, united states, america, interstate, interstate 35
Language
English
Disciplines
History
Description/Abstract
This project examines the creation and renovation of Interstate 35 in Texas through the lens of cultural history and societal analysis. It begins with the highway’s formulation and predecessors, ending with the passage and immediate impact of NAFTA following over two decades of disillusionment. In this paper, the road is not solely viewed through the lens of state interests. Local and national concerns and powers balanced Texan interests in the course of the road’s creation and are therefore investigated in conversation with each other. This paper contends that the creation of Interstate 35 in Texas took a patchwork of state highways into a larger national system. This is one of the effects of Texas seemingly becoming less of a Southern state and more of a national power throughout the 20th century. Early leaders saw the positive, short-term effects of I-35 with myopia. They were unable or unwilling to see the realities of separation, isolation, and disparity that this liquid road of motion brought about. The research here creates an analytical, chronological narrative of Texas’s I-35 in a national context, showing its similarities and differences with the national system through five overarching themes: growth and sprawl; disillusionment; the nationalization of Texas; interaction between local, state, and national forces; and liquidity. Into the present day, I-35 has made many Texans too reliant on a placeless culture of automobility.
Recommended Citation
Friesenhahn, Carl, "This Liquid Road of Motion: The Interstate 35 Corridor Transformation, 1950-1995" (2024). History - All Scholarship. 5.
https://surface.syr.edu/hst/5
Source
submission
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Additional Information
This essay was originally written and published while at Baylor University. Its first draft was crafted in Dr. T. Michael Parrish's Fall 2021 History 3380 course (History of Texas). This paper was turned into an article in the Journal of South Texas Vol. 38, Iss. 1 (pp. 1-39).