Paving the Future: Assistant Professor Amanda Katz on the Intersection of History and Roadway Engineering

It highlights how as the historian among engineers I have something valuable to contribute. I can speak to a current problem engineers are trying to solve: our failing infrastructure. And I also serve as a liaison to the public by creating educational materials for folks. That is a great example of public history: helping folks understand.

Amanda Katz is an assistant professor of U.S. History, specializing in science, technology, and environment. Within these fields, she focuses on rural and municipal infrastructure, transportation equity, and historical continuities among interconnected global communities. Her current research explores the development of American highway engineering in the early twentieth century. As an applied historian, Katz serves as a researcher for USU’s Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification (ASPIRE) Engineering Research Center. She welcomes both undergraduate and graduate students who might like to conduct research in these areas.

You were recently awarded a research grant through USU’s ASPIRE, a National Science Foundation engineering research Lab. What does this entail?

The ASPIRE engineering research center here at USU is focused on researching and implementing electrified roadways — as one of their current projects — and really moving in the direction of more sustainable and equitable transportation infrastructure. We collaborate with universities, industry folks, and innovators in the U.S. and beyond. ASPIRE has been working with a six-year funding structure, and this year they added me to the research team on two projects, offering me some funding so that I could contribute relevant and applied historical research to these two projects

You mentioned that this new infrastructure is geared towards electrified roadways, do you mind telling us more about this?

Yes. Currently, there are four projects ASPIRE is working on, one of which is, in fact, electrified roadways. I am now involved with this project, which is maybe hilarious because I am not an engineer. But I do study the history of highway engineering. What we have found is that my research on early experimental roadbuilding programs in the early twentieth-century U.S. directly connects to the experimental (electrified) road construction programs of today. The process of experimentation, testing materials, and engaging communities is eerily similar — in the best of ways, of course! And the goal is to try constructing an electrified transportation infrastructure. For example, ASPIRE engineers and collaborators have built “sample” or “demonstration roads” — electrified roads — in different parts of the country. We have an electrified track here at USU, and there is a piece of electrified road in Indiana, which, coincidentally, was where some of the first roads were tested back in the early 1900s. These “object-lesson roads” test the technology, so that when the time comes to build a national (or even local) infrastructure we know it works — that the electrified roads reduce individual automobile owners’ dependence on electric vehicles and are instead absorbed by the infrastructure itself. The idea is accessibility, equity, and sustainability.

What is the other project?

The other project I am on is called Pathways. It’s very much a cross-institutional, multidisciplinary project where we strive to create certain educational pathways and learning opportunities for folks who want to be in a diverse workforce, especially related to electric vehicles and electric infrastructures. But it also includes teaching courses, like the transportation equity course team-taught by two of our colleagues at Purdue University and the University of Texas, El Paso. I’m hoping to join in and co-teach this class with them next year! But we all also work to generate materials for students of all ages as well as the broader audiences among the public.

How do you use applied/public history for roadway engineering and infrastructure?

Well, in this situation, I’m learning that engineers — all kinds — have a desire to learn more about the history of their own profession. Most notably, highway or transportation engineering came late to the U.S.; it wasn’t formally or fully established or professionalized until the early twentieth century, really the 1920s and 1930s. As a historian, I have studied the development of American highway engineering, tracing the impetus and evolution of it from the 1890s through the Great Depression. Bringing that history to the electrified roads conversation demonstrates the longevity of federal highway engineering practices. In many ways, I can show engineers that what they are doing today has a long history, one that began in the nineteenth century. What this does is highlight how innovation operates among maintenance and routine. While 100 years ago engineers tested crushed oyster shells, clay, molasses, or any mixture of natural materials to see if it would be a good road surfacing material, today, we are figuring out electricity and energy as a sublevel of roads below the surface! We are still using “object-lesson roads” to determine best practices. This is very much applied history. It highlights how as the historian among engineers I have something valuable to contribute. I can speak to a current problem engineers are trying to solve: our failing infrastructure. And I also serve as a liaison to the public by creating educational materials for folks. That is a great example of public history: helping folks understand

How do roads, and the science behind them, tell a story?

It’s the antithetical story to the cultural value that Americans ascribe to roads. We all know Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” And many others speak to the “open road” and the “freedom” of the road. These sentiments tie in quite nicely with American identity, which is constructed around life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The highway is a popular American trope symbolic of opportunity. Twentieth-century American literature clearly shows us this. And that is how I got into this research. I majored in American literature as an undergrad and fell in love with these kinds of stories. The road means something to people — what it means is not always clear, but it has a very strong symbolic meaning to folks.

I wanted to know about how “the road” reached such an elevated status. How does Route 66 become the Mother Road? Now does “Main Street America” become representative of every small town in the United States? And why is it always “the road” to which we are returning? Why do we “hit the road” in times of uncertainty or in times of peril? In real life, any given road is super menial, super vernacular; we mostly ignore them or are angry at them when there are potholes or tolls to pay or when they are icy or not well maintained. We often have nothing nice to say about them unless we are going out on the open road. Then our tune changes. It becomes adventurous and uninhibited: “I’m going to explore! I’m going on a road trip!”

And I just thought, “Huh. We didn’t always have roads — not as we understand them today — so how did they come to be?” I began researching early road construction and learned the concerted effort began in the late nineteenth century, primarily in rural areas. I then traced how people felt about that process, as roads have always been quite political, and there are real economic factors, not to mention issues surrounding inequity and injustice that we see rather explicitly during the Eisenhower interstate era. Those superhighways slashed through urban communities. But what about when small towns in the early twentieth century fought with each other during the Lincoln Highway route selection process? I wanted to see a more grounded or concrete — ha! — way folks responded to roads to help me better understand why they hold this unique cultural position in American pop culture.

I mean people are going to have feelings about [the electrified roadways]. That’s the thing. And humanists, historians especially, offer history as an analytical tool to provide narratives that explain complex or controversial issues, or why engineering projects are unfolding in the ways that they do. It’s really an opportunity for STEM and humanist folks to engage in conversations together, to better prepare the public for innovation and change. The U.S. has long needed an overhaul of its transportation infrastructure. That’s a huge conceptual abstraction that doesn’t resonate with many Americans on fundamental levels. But, when you have lived in a community where a bridge has collapsed, and you can’t get to work, like I have, you recognize how important infrastructure and conversations about infrastructure are to every person living in this country. You also realize how big of a challenge, and how massive of an undertaking, it is to try to create new infrastructure where there is already an existing one that we can’t just demolish. This goes for airports, this goes for train stations, railroads, subways, bus routes, locks and dams, and all sorts of public (and private) transit lines.

What goals do you have for your research with ASPIRE?

Oh, so many! But one bigger goal that I am looking forward to maybe as early as the spring semester, but certainly for next year, is that I would like to get some undergraduate and graduate student researchers on board. Much of this funding I have can be used to compensate student researchers who might be interested in transportation systems, or infrastructure, or just be as excited about roads as I get! I am looking to work with any students in the History Department certainly, but also students in CHaSS, or those in STEM who are studying other disciplines. Any student interested in working on historical interpretations, implications, and applied research relating to highway transportation, transportation systems, and infrastructures should absolutely reach out to me!

Why is history important to science and engineering?

Because everything has a history! That’s the short answer. Even disciplines and even professions [have a history]. I think understanding the longer reality of anything is important. History of science, history of engineering, history of technology — these are important because science and technology today are not what they were twenty years ago. Certainly not what science was back in 600 BCE, or when Aristotle and Plato were coming up with natural philosophies to help people understand the world, or when the Chinese invented woodblock printing. However, what is consistent is that humans rely on science and technology to help create order in the world so that we can understand it and function within it. As a humanist, I would argue that the histories of science and technology are worth knowing — for those of us who look at people and for those of us who look at the practices that people employ. They are interrelated, and we all benefit from collaborating and working together because then we get a more comprehensive, albeit complicated, view of things. But that’s life, right? Life is complex. So, to me, it only makes sense that recognizing that the history of engineering (broadly) has evolved over centuries across the globe is mind-boggling but also fun! This can help folks who then become practitioners in these fields because they know the history, and that can help inform how they approach their work.