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Going Places: Transportation Redefines the Twentieth-Century West. By Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. xix + 419 pp. Photographs, illustrations, notes, suggested reading, index. $39.95.
What was unique about the West in twentieth-century transportation history? Carlos Schwantes does not make the claim, but the bulk of what he writes suggests that aviation's triumph as the preferred mode of passenger travel owes a great deal to the circumstances of geography in the American West. Getting there faster was the business traveler's need. Railroads could provide this in the East, but not in the West, where distances simply were too great. In one of the most interesting sections of Going Places, Schwantes...