Overview

How the railroads transformed American life between 1829 and 1929, and why the cost of their achievements was so damaging to the social and economic life of the nation. A quite wonderful book...richly textured and intellectually stimulating. —Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University. Selected by Choice as an outstanding book for 1997.

Full Product Details

Author:   Sarah H. Gordon
Publisher:   Ivan R Dee, Inc
Imprint:   Ivan R Dee, Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 16.20cm , Height: 3.60cm , Length: 23.90cm
Weight:   0.758kg
ISBN:  

9781566631389

ISBN 10:   1566631386
Pages:   416
Publication Date:   01 November 1997
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Reviews

A quite wonderful book...richly textured and intellectually stimulating.--Elizabeth Blackmur Columbia University

A compelling argument. * Journal of Southern History * Engaging and nicely written, with a definitive and sustained point of view. * Virginia Quarterly Review * Continually intriguing and particularly rich...layered. -- Michael Kennedy * Chicago Tribune * One of the best accounts I have read of the railroad in America. It blends history, technology, business, and social concerns to achieve a total perspective. -- James F. Goodwin, former president, Connecticut Central Railroad * Columbia University * A quite wonderful book...richly textured and intellectually stimulating. -- Elizabeth Blackmur * Columbia University *

As social historian Gordon (Quinnipiac Coll.) ably demonstrates, the creation of a national railroad was anything but an easy ride. Early proponents of an interstate rail network faced enormous troubles. There were Luddites, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who objected to the noise and smell of progress; legal battles, such as the Supreme Court case in which a man named Beers was awarded damages when a train killed several of his oxen (the court found for the plaintiff because the train had been speeding at 20 m.p.h.); tensions between the rural and urban populations; and not least of all, the budding conflict between North and South, involving sectionalism and slavery, that would eventually explode into the Civil War. Railroads were so deeply associated with the industrial, urban North that they became a natural metaphor for emancipation. No wonder railroad union was almost as difficult to attain in that era as national union was. Gordon analyzes the various disputes that went into the making of the railroads, and she offers plenty of railroad lore along the way, citing liberally from James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, and Charles Dickens, among others, all of whom had much to say about the American railways. Of the casual rural stations, for example, Dickens noted wryly: The train calls at stations in the woods, where the wild impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out is only to be equaled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of there being anybody to get in. And mores of railroad travel had more than one contemporary observer up in arms: To restore herself to her caste, let a lady move in select company at 5 miles an hour, declared one disgruntled gentleman. A solid, readable history of America's fledgling railroad system. (Kirkus Reviews)

One of the best accounts I have read of the railroad in America. It blends history, technology, business, and social concerns to achieve a total perspective.--James F. Goodwin, former president, Connecticut Central Railroad Columbia University

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