TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 475 road legislation, requiring the establishment of state highway com missions and leading to the employment of state engineers and stan dard designs. Cooper continues with a more specific history of Indiana’s bridge companies. The second part of the book is devoted to the various types of metal bridges—arches, trusses, cantilevered and suspended spans, moving spans, girders, and viaducts—with a discussion of Indiana examples and their builders. Details of each type’s development, structure, and construction are given, as well as characteristics of individual bridge companies’ work. Part 3 contains the inventory itself. Introductory material includes sources ofadditional information and a plea for corrections, additions, or further information that readers may discover, as Cooper considers the list a “work in progress” (p. 111). He lists all known surviving pre1930 metal bridges, each identified by its number, name, the road or railroad it carries, what it crosses, the type of bridge, date, builder, and a rating of its historical significance either to the community or in terms of bridge technology. Details on how the ratings were determined, as well as Indiana’s preservation plan for historic bridges and a short history of the state’s efforts to document its historic bridges, make up the fourth part of the book, written by Richard A. Gantz, chairman of the Indiana His toric Bridge Committee. Iron Monuments is illustrated with nearly 300 modern and historic photographs, some sixty plans and other illustrations from bridge company records, and around thirty modern diagrams. Unfortu nately, the link between text and illustration is not always clear, a particular failing in the discussion of Indiana bridge types in part 2. The text itself is not always clear, again especially in part 2. All told, however, the book is a feast for bridge enthusiasts, a guide for pres ervationists, and a fine example for other states interested in docu menting and preserving their transportation heritage. Nan Lawler Ms. Lawler processes manuscripts in the Special Collections Department, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville. Her article on “Closing the Gap: The Coast Line and Its Bridges in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties” (Railroad History 145 [Autumn 1981]: 87—105) was reprinted as a booklet in 1984 by the Institute for American Research, Goleta, Calif. Currently she is working on a master’s thesis on the Ozark Trails Association, an early-20th-century highway and good roads organization. The Ambassador Bridge: A Monument to Progress. By Philip P. Mason. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987. Pp. 250; illustrations, notes, appendix, index. $24.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). The author of The Ambassador Bridge, Philip P. Mason, is professor of history at Wayne State University and director of the Archives of 476 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Labor and Urban Affairs of the Walter P. Reuther Library. He divides the history of the Ambassador Bridge, “one of the first spans built exclusively for vehicular traffic and one which has successfully com peted with railroads” (p. 30), into three parts: the various attempts to build a bridge over the Detroit River from the 1870s to the 1920s; the actual design and construction of the span connecting Detroit and Windsor, Canada; and the operation of the bridge during its first fiftyeight years. By beginning his story decades before the bridge’s con struction, Mason is able to recount the process by which area residents weighed alternatives and developed political and financial support for the bridge. This is an important part of the history of any public works—but one that is too often ignored. Mason does a fine job of describing the actual design and construction. He also discusses the variety of financial and operational problems encountered after the bridge’s completion in 1929. One of the strengths of this book is that the history of the bridge is carefully placed into the larger context of both local and national events. The reader has a clear sense of why this bridge was needed, as well as the effect its construction had on Detroit and Windsor. Another strength is that Mason introduces the reader to many indi viduals who were in some way important to the story, includingJoseph Bower...