Since the beginnings of motorized flight in 1903, air transport has become one of the backbones of long-distance travel and a key factor in the globalization process that has typified the second half of the twentieth century. Despite the importance of airports as nodes where different traffic modalities interconnect, their impact on the local or regional economy, and (especially in the United States) their spread and number, relatively few historians have studied airports seriously. Janet R. Daly Bednarek's groundbreaking book is therefore important in filling a gap in our understanding of the rise of the modern transport infrastructure. She points out that, after the construction of the first airport in Atlantic City in 1919, the evolution of airports in the United States through the mid-1940s was the result of an interplay between local actions, developments at the state legislative level, and federal policies. Bednarek focuses on municipal policy and city planning and draws out how and why airports became public, municipal, responsibilities. In the first few years after 1918, local interests responded to encouragements from the army and from the post office to construct flying fields purpose-adapted for use both as training grounds for the Army Air Corps and as way points for the proposed network of routes for the airmail services of the U.S. Post Office. While the army applied to local responsibility for the formation of a nationwide network of training grounds for the new branch of the national defense, post office officials pointed to the economic significance of speeding up mail deliveries. Local responses, Bednarek asserts, tied in with the general atmosphere of “air enthusiasm” of the period. City planners and urban boosters from the local chambers of commerce rallied behind the belief that the “air age” that was expected to arrive would make investments in airports profitable. But when financial returns failed to arrive, some form of federal involvement in airport construction and operation became inevitable. To this effect a National Airport Plan, which called for a nationwide system of civilian airports, was sent to Congress in 1939. Wartime circumstances militarized this plan into the Development of Landing Areas for National Defense (DLAND) program. This in turn formed the starting point for a renewed drive toward federal appropriations for the construction of municipal airports throughout the United States: the somewhat parsimonious Federal Airport Act of 1946.