The Digital Museum of U.S. Highway 50 is an exploration of Highway 50’s cultural history corridor, not only to understand the many subcultures along the highway’s path, but also as a means of understanding the United States’ history as a whole, by treating the highway as an objective framework to explore the country’s broader historical patterns and relationships.
The Highway 50 Digital History Museum is a demonstration of the potential of the emerging field of digital public history. Its online format offers the reader direct access to primary and secondary research sources wherever available. The hybridization of historical narrative with inline imagery, video, and data visualization aims for the best of both worlds with respect to visual relevance and written context. One mission of this digital museum is to inspire future collaboration between historians, designers, and web developers to increase the accessibility of history beyond the realm of academia.
American highway history is a world of Benzedrine-addicted truckers, traveling preachers, motel room hookups, highway patrolmen, auto mechanics, Dust Bowl refugees, and billboard painters, to name a few. It was built by the tools of industrial capitalism, socialist-inspired government programs, and prison labor, in order to satisfy the needs of both the military industrial complex and the common sharecropper alike. Above all else, the highway is a network, a series of intersections linking diverse elements to each other, even if only temporarily. The highway is a venue in which countless subcultures intersect, each influenced by one another and connected by simple gravel, tar, and paint.
The American highway system is the single biggest public project in human history, as well as the single-biggest influence on American life in the 20th century. Virtually all roads in America connect with each other; in the broadest sense, every American grew up on the same road, a highway which can take them to all the same places. Whatever the meaning of the road is, it strikes at the heart of the disparate egalitarianism that is the paradox of American identity.
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