The Transcontinental Railroad and the Making of Modern America
Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Emeritus at Stanford University. A U.S. historian who specializes in the American West, the history of capitalism, environmental history, history and memory, and Native American history, Professor White is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the Mellon Distinguished Professor Award. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, for his works The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, and Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.
Overview
The transcontinental railroads formed the most ambitious and rather complex federal infrastructure project of the nineteenth century. At one extreme, the construction of the Pacific Railway was absolutely a triumph. On the other hand, its operation, and the operation of the other transcontinentals, was (to put it bluntly) a train wreck.
The thesis of this unique presentation is simple, though it’s not the usual textbook account: the U.S. built too many railroads, we built them too soon, we financed them recklessly, and we allowed them to inflict grave environmental, social, political, and economic damage. All of this was bad enough, and recognized by many at the time, but there’s more. In our own time, Americans have forgotten much of what nineteenth-century Americans came to know. We have celebrated the over-construction that we should be lamenting, and we have often brought the transcontinentals forward as reason to pursue equally dubious current projects.
Recommended Reading:
Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, by Richard White
Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, by David Haward Bain
Discussion Questions:
- Why build a transcontinental railroad in the 1860s?
- Why build multiple transcontinental railroads?
- Can we imagine a counterfactual in which the United States either does not subsidize transcontinental railroads, funds only one and heavily regulates it, or owns the railroad outright?