HISTOKIC AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 



By Albekt C. Rose 

 Senior Eightvay Engineer, Public Roads Administration, Federal Works Agency 



[With 18 plates] 



William Shakespeare, the bard of Stratford on Avon, whose por- 

 trayal of the human character and mastery of the art of expres- 

 sion has delighted the lovers of the best in English literature for 

 generations, once made the observation that : 



All the world's a stage, 

 And all the men and women merely players. 



The great playwright well knew the power of the drama to plumb 

 the depths of the human emotions through the sense avenues of sight 

 and hearing. He was adept in the use of a stage setting to portray 

 ideas which words alone never could express. 



To this day these pictorial tools give a dramatist a decided advant- 

 age over the writer who strives bit by bit to build up a word picture 

 in the mind of the reader with the aid of a pen or pencil alone. The 

 author accomplishes liis purposes progressively by means of skillfully 

 associated words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs in which the 

 original thought germ grows until it is revealed full-fledged in its final 

 form. This mental scene which the writer builds gradually the 

 artist presents instantly by means of a picture blurred by no barrier 

 of language, latitude, period, or age. Thus the Eskimo in Greenland 

 and the Hottentot of South Africa may be instructed to see the same 

 physical elements in a picture even though their emotional reactions 

 to the sight may be strangely different. The ancient Chinese no doubt 

 had these ideas in mind when they formulated many centuries ago 

 their celebrated proverb : "Hua-i neng ta ch'ien yen." This old say- 

 ing, according to Dr. A. W. Hummel, Chief of the Division of 

 Orientalia of the Library of Congress, means literally, "Picture's 

 meaning can express a thousand words," or a more familiar translation 

 is, "One picture tells a thousand words." 



It is because pictures express ideas in the clearest and most summary 

 form that this effort has been made to present the story of American 

 highways with the aid of a series of dioramas — a teclinical term used 



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