Stories From The Stacks

In this recorded lecture "Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape," Francesca Russello Ammon explores how postwar America came to equate this destruction with progress. Although the decades following World War II were marked by rapid growth and construction in the United States, those years were also a time of large-scale destruction. In order to clear space for new suburban tract housing, interstate highways, and urban renewal projects, wrecking companies demolished buildings and earth-moving contractors leveled land at an unprecedented rate and scale.