| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle. Signs in America's Auto Age: Signatures of Landscape and Place. (American Land and Life Series.) Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2004. Pp. xxxiii, 219. Cloth $49.95, paper $24.95.
Signs in all their variety have long marked and guided use of space, but the automobile age with increased road speed and unfamiliarity changed the way that Americans experienced these messages. Signs in the form of commercial communications became more ubiquitous as the car culture became part of the consumer culture in the twentieth century. This book explores these changes, using the findings of the historical as well as cultural geographical disciplines. John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, experts on the history of the American roadside, provide a rich, often insightful, but also sometimes disappointingly surface understanding of this topic.	1
For the historian unversed and open to analysis of the role of signs in imparting cultural meanings of space, this book provides a helpful primer using the insights of cultural sociologists like George Mead and modern semiotics. Jakle and Sculle discuss three broad categories of signs: commercial signs (downtown and Main Street, roadside), public messages guiding traffic and designating community, and signs marking personal space. The book concludes with a wide ranging discussion of sign aesthetics. While secondary sources are used extensively and well, the authors refer frequently to published primary materials, especially trade journals.	. . .

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