Jack Reid is an American historian and the author of Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation (UNC Press, 2020). In this conversation, we talk about the specific culture, between the 1930s and 1970s, that produced hitchhiking as a common social experience, when ordinary Americans would travel with strangers they met on the road. What happened to hitchhiking? And what does its disappearance tell us about our lonely historical moment?

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