About this Event
Huxley and Hiro thrilled to host author and local historian, William Francis Albensi for an evening discussion on his text Wilmington Before Interstate 95! Moderated by Emily Lieb, it promises to be an evening of insight and inspiration!
Book Description:
Interstate 95 was constructed as part of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, signed into law by Pres. Dwight Eisenhower. Francis “Frank” Victor du Pont (1894–1962), son of T. Coleman du Pont, who gave Delaware the DuPont Highway, was the US commissioner of the Bureau of Public Roads from 1953 to 1955. Frank du Pont was a key figure in promoting a national highway and for championing the need for this new interstate system to access city centers. This “Center City” requirement came into play when a lame duck Wilmington City Council on June 21, 1957, approved placing the interstate between Adams and Jackson Streets, essentially cleaving the city and ignoring various protest groups who favored a route east of the city.
Wilmington before Interstate 95 is author William Francis’s sixth book for Arcadia Publishing, all dedicated to the history of the First State. The book contains images primarily from the Delaware State Public Archives dated in the 1950s and early 1960s, highlighting west Wilmington and the neighborhoods demolished for the interstate as well as a city history and the downtown area from this bygone era.
About the Author:
Wilmington before Interstate 95 is author William Francis’s sixth book for Arcadia Publishing, all dedicated to the history of the First State. The book contains images primarily from the Delaware State Public Archives dated in the 1950s and early 1960s, highlighting west Wilmington and the neighborhoods demolished for the interstate as well as a city history and the downtown area from this bygone era.
About the Moderator:
Emily Lieb is the author of , published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Road to Nowhere is about something that never quite happened: an unfinished interstate highway through Black West Baltimore. More than that, it is about the people and communities in the expressway’s path, and about the enormous harm a map alone can do.
She has an undergraduate degree in U.S. History from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a PhD in U.S. History from Columbia University in New York. For a long time, she taught history and urban studies at Seattle University; now she writes about global health and climate change for a living at Derfner & Sons. She is also studying to be an archivist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Information School.
Lieb researchs and writes about twentieth-century American cities and neighborhoods, and about all the things that carved them apart—from segregated schools to urban renewal programs to real-estate speculation to transportation planning—and pulled them together. She is working on a new book, tentatively titled Save Our City, about the exclusionary histories of historic preservation in Seattle and other American cities.
Books will be available for purchase at the event.
Free Entrance, Registration Required
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Huxley & Hiro Booksellers, 601 North Market Street, Wilmington, United States
USD 0.00
