The United States emerged as the undisputed military and economic leader after World War II, though tensions with communist powers remained high during the Cold War era. Americans enjoyed newfound prosperity in the postwar years and embraced innovations like the automobile and highway system, which transformed where and how they lived and worked by enabling suburban expansion. New roads and highways rolled out from cities to suburbs, as the middle class adopted an increasingly mobile lifestyle centered around automobile use.
The United States emerged as the undisputed military and economic leader after World War II, though tensions with communist powers remained high during the Cold War era. Americans enjoyed newfound prosperity in the postwar years and embraced innovations like the automobile and highway system, which transformed where and how they lived and worked by enabling suburban expansion. New roads and highways rolled out from cities to suburbs, as the middle class adopted an increasingly mobile lifestyle centered around automobile use.
The United States emerged as the undisputed military and economic leader after World War II, though tensions with communist powers remained high during the Cold War era. Americans enjoyed newfound prosperity in the postwar years and embraced innovations like the automobile and highway system, which transformed where and how they lived and worked by enabling suburban expansion. New roads and highways rolled out from cities to suburbs, as the middle class adopted an increasingly mobile lifestyle centered around automobile use.
THE UNITED STATES in the years after World War II was a restless place, engaged in an audacious social experiment that would eventually transform how and where Americans worked, played, and consumed. Victorious with the Allied nations against the Axis, then instrumental in the rebuilding of Europe, the United States had become the West's undisputed military and economic champion. Not all was cheery, mind you. Communist powers posed a new threat, the nuclear age had dawned, and Cold War anxieties ran high. Yet Americans felt confident in their place atop the global order and free to invent new ways to enjoy their burgeoning prosperity. The automobile was central to the cense of open-ended possibility shared by America's rapidly growing middle class. Spurred by the development of the Interstate Highway System, new roads were rolling out from the cities to the suburbs springing up at