transcontinental railway

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description: contiguous network of railroad trackage that crosses a continental land mass with terminals at different oceans or continental borders

210 results

pages: 424 words: 140,262

Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World
by Christian Wolmar
Published 1 Mar 2010

This strong whiff of suspicion did not prevent the boat owners from suing the railroad for putting the bridge in their way when it might have been expected that the railroad had a rather stronger case against them for destroying its structure! Here Abraham Lincoln enters the story as he played a significant but largely forgotten role in US railroad history, first as the lawyer representing the railroad in this case but, more importantly, by later becoming the major political support of the transcontinental railroad. The Effie Aflon case inevitably became a test of the much wider issue of whether the right of railroads to traverse rivers prevailed over those who used the waterways. The case pitted whole communities against each other, with the city of Chicago naturally supporting the railroad while riverside towns such as St Louis opposed it.

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In court, he tactfully acknowledged that the accident had been down to ‘pilot error’ but argued that the need for Americans to travel between east and west to populate the vast country should be paramount. The jury was tied, which meant the railroad won and, despite a later successful appeal in the Iowa courts, it eventually prevailed in the Supreme Court which declared that bridges were not a hazard to navigation. 37 The way to the West was opened up and the dream of a transcontinental railroad soon became a reality, but not before the country was rent apart by the Civil War. By the 1850s the railroads had become more than just the way to get to the next town, establishing themselves as the basic means of transportation whatever the distance. However, the small size of the average railroad and the lack of joint working arrangements between them meant that longer journeys involved much inconvenience and, at last, voices were being heard in favour of unifying the system.

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As a recent history of the railroads says: ‘The success with which local interests managed to hobble their lusty steed for over thirty years is a testament to the vigor of state and local rights in an age in which the powers of federalism were hardly realized.’ 38 Then the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 blocked further progress towards consolidation. By the start of the war, railroads had spread throughout the eastern part of the country and much of the South but the lines heading west stopped at the major rivers. The great project for a transcontinental railroad, first conceived by the early rail pioneers thirty years previously, and actively promoted in the mid-1850s, would have to wait. The Civil War was to provide another sort of test for the railroads, which they passed remarkably well, demonstrating, as one historian says, that ‘the railroads did more to change the art of war than anything since gunpowder’. 39 As we have seen, the military value of the railways was recognized in Europe right from the start when they were used early on to move troops quickly to quell revolts or tame rioters.

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration
by Kent E. Calder
Published 28 Apr 2019

The second key geographical transformation in America’s ascent to global power—also accomplished through new infrastructural connections—was the building of the Panama Canal. As in the case of the transcontinental railroad, the actual construction was preceded by a lengthy period of conceptualization, change in national political-economic incentives, and consensus building. The result was a clear conversion of America’s international standing from regional into full-fledged global power. Conceptualization began even before completion of the transcontinental railway itself, although not by Americans. In 1869 Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, an entrepreneurial French aristocrat, completed construction of the Suez Canal, with an eye to revolutionizing world shipping through constructed waterways.

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In 1860 Theodore Judah’s eminently realistic proposal for a route through Iowa, Nebraska, and across the Sierra Nevada to Sacramento ended the routing debate.6 President Buchanan was persuaded, and Republicans included Judah’s proposed route in their national platform for the 1860 presidential campaign.7 The election of Abraham Lincoln sealed the matter, with Lincoln enthusiastically signing the Pacific Railroad Act, providing financing and land grants for the railroad, in 1862.8 Together with mundane economic considerations, especially prominent among the builders themselves, geopolitics also figured in the building of the transcontinental railway. As William Gilpin, arguably America’s first geopolitician, wrote presciently in 1860, America’s “intermediate geographical position between Asia and Europe and their populations, invests her with the powers and duties of arbiter between them.”9 In narrower political-military terms, the Lincoln White House was concerned, amidst the Civil War, with a mix of threats from rivals. Confederate incursions had reached as far as New Mexico, while England was financing railroads across Canada. Meanwhile France was also building a transcontinental railway across Mexico, creating the danger that both Britain and France could potentially have closer contact with California than the Union’s east coast, distracted by bitter conflict, actually did.10 Although geopolitical concerns, rendered urgent by the exigencies of civil war, may have figured prominently in creating the continentalist policy framework, it was private enterprise that brought the transcontinental railway to actual fruition.

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Thomas Jefferson, in an 1812 letter to John Jacob Astor, foresaw the day when American settlers would cover the length of the Pacific coast with “free and independent Americans, unconnected with us but by the ties of blood and interest.”2 Thomas Hart Benton in 1820 was even more ambitious, stressing not only the value of America’s march to the Pacific but also the mutual worth, to both America and East Asian peoples also, of trans-Pacific ties.3 xiv Introduction Concrete proposals for a transcontinental railroad began emerging in the 1830s, with Asa Whitney, a New York merchant who had recently visited China, making a proposal in 1845 for a railroad from Lake Michigan to the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon.4 Over the following decade, proposals proliferated, with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis’s 1856 report narrowing the discussion to five routes.5 Behind the proliferation of proposals was a steady transformation across the first half of the nineteenth century in both American territorial scale and in related political-economic interests.

pages: 501 words: 145,097

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
by Simon Winchester
Published 14 Oct 2013

For it had been just two weeks before, on Monday, May 10, and a mere two hundred miles to the west, at a place called Promontory Summit, in Utah, that the two steam engines, the Union Pacific’s Locomotive No. 119 and the Central Pacific’s Jupiter, had met, cowcatcher to cowcatcher, on the lines that were to be joined by the famous golden spike. The transcontinental railroad had been completed, and trains were from this moment on crossing regularly between America’s Eastern cities and those in the West. And in doing so, they would rattle across this very bridge, beneath which John Wesley Powell and his men were setting off into the unknown. Trains with restaurant cars and pianos and sleeping berths and night porters and sundry other elements of comfort and luxury would pass overhead of their launching site, running between New York and California by way of Wyoming at thirty miles an hour, crossing the continent in only seven days.

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But what was bound here into one was really just the East and the northern Midwest—the America that lay between the Atlantic Ocean and the Missouri River. To forge a real link and bring the entire continental nation together needed a concerted act of will, a practicable route, a formidable design, a great deal of money, and more hard work than the nation had ever witnessed. The transcontinental railroad, which would allow and encourage travel from ocean to ocean—with a promised journey time of days, not months—was the prize above all others. The first plans for a cross-country railway were offered in 1838, a mere decade after the first trains began running on the B&O. The first serious surveys were commissioned by Congress in 1853, though politics prevented the selection of any one of the five projected routes.

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THE IMMORTAL LEGACY OF CRAZY JUDAH Theodore Dehone Judah, a preacher’s son from Connecticut, had surveyed the terrible majesty of the Sierra Nevada in 1860, and after much time and thought and whole seasons of climbing and mapmaking, he decided that the Donner Pass, the notorious site where almost half of a party of westbound pioneers had died in 1846, trapped by an early-season snowstorm, was the ideal route to take a transcontinental railroad over the most difficult mountain barrier of them all. I first crossed the Donner Pass late in the 1980s. It was early spring, and I was in a hurry. I had been in Montana and was driving fast to San Francisco to catch a plane back to Hong Kong, where I then lived. I was on Interstate 80 westbound.

pages: 612 words: 200,406

The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885
by Pierre Berton
Published 1 Jan 1971

Thanks to his GPR experience he came out of World War I a major-general and went on to become the largest contractor in the West, helping to build another ill-fated transcontinental railroad, the Grand Trunk Pacific, and founding, for the Liberal Party of British Columbia, a lively newspaper, the Vancouver Sun. After the turn of the century these men spearheaded the great wave of Canadian “utility imperialism” (as one historian has called it) – building power plants, railways, and streetcar lines all over Latin America and two more transcontinental railways in Canada. William Mackenzie helped to launch in São Paulo the gigantic Brazilian Traction corporation, a firm that was to grow almost as big as the CPR itself.

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The distance involved was more than five thousand miles, and yet, in 1883, End of Track was only a few hundred miles away. Chapter Six 1 The Promised Land 2 The displaced people 3 Prohibition 4 The magical influence 5 George Stephen’s disastrous gamble 6 The CPR goes political 1 The Promised Land By the spring of 1883, Canada was a country with half a transcontinental railroad. Between Port Moody and Ottawa, the track lay in pieces like a child’s train set – long stretches of finished road separated by formidable gaps. The easiest part of the CPR was complete: a continuous line of steel ran west for 937 miles from Fort William at the head of Lake Superior to the tent community of Swift Current in the heart of Palliser’s Triangle.

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But the government lien, together with the bitter campaign being waged against the CPR in New York and London, had frightened off potential buyers. Unless he could make an arrangement to get rid of that lien he faced an impossible situation. It was a maddening dilemma: as soon as the CPR became a through line the profits would roll in, for it held a mileage advantage over other transcontinental railroads. Goods arriving from the Orient could speed across Canada to the Atlantic far faster than any rival road could carry them. But could the CPR be completed? By October, Stephen realized that there simply was not enough money to do the job. He set off for England for the third time that year, seeking to raise more funds.

pages: 323 words: 94,406

To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad
by Christian Wolmar
Published 4 Aug 2014

INDEX accidents and derailments, 101, 103–5, 120, 151, 223, 239–40 Achinsk, 105–6 Afghanistan, 37, 45 Alaska, 8, 33, 249 alcohol, 18, 57, 78, 155, 166, 252 Aleksandrovsk, 20, 31 Alexander I, Tsar, 2, 10, 38 Alexander II, Tsar, 25–6, 35, 51 Alexander III, Tsar, 28, 35, 40–1, 58–62 Alexander III memorial fund, 157 American Civil War, 34 Amur, river, 30–3, 38–9, 41, 68–9, 129, 165, 167–8, 200, 209, 212 Amur Railway, 65–6, 69, 98, 139, 180, 209, 216, 231, 255 construction, 165, 167–71 costs, 170–1 Angara, river, 66, 84–5, 89, 102, 199, 229, 231, 234 Angara, 91 Angola, 238 Annenkov, General Boris, 185 Annenkov, General Mikhail, 39, 45–6 anthrax, 87, 89 Archangelsk, 174, 195 Arkhipov, Peter, 151 Armstrong, Mitchell & Co., 90 Australia, 35 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 15–16, 172, 176–7 Baedeker, 120 Baikal, 90–1, 95 Baikal Amur Railway (BAM), xv–xvi, 230–50, 258–9 and collapse of communism, 247–8, 259 completion, 244 costs, 240, 246, 249 environmental damage, 242–5, 249 subsidence problems, 239–40 Baikal Station, 132 Baker, Newton, 181 Baku, 174, 195 Barabinskaya steppe, 82 Baranov Commission, 40 Baring, Maurice, 140 Beijing, 102, 111, 230 panorama, 110 Peking–Paris road, race, 162–3 Belebubsky, Nikolai, 84 Belozerskoe, 39 Bering Strait, 7–8, 33, 249 Bezobrazov, General Pyotr, 130 birch trees, 104 Bismarck, Otto von, 144 Black Sea, 24–5, 86 Blagoveshchensk, 128 Bloch, Jan, 50 Bobrinski, Count Vladimir, 49 brakemen, 119 braking systems, 94 Bratsk, 231, 233–4 Brezhnev, Leonid, 235–7, 244, 246, 248 bridges, 27, 64–5, 69, 74, 87, 89, 101, 103, 156, 161 on Amur Railway, 168–70 on Baikal line, 134–5 construction of, 76–7, 81–2, 94 damaged in civil war, 198, 201, 208–9, 212 improvements to, 84, 112 on Manchurian line, 125–7, 129, 132 road bridges, 4 Britain expansionist policies, 123 export market, 158 railway construction costs, 88 railway network, 41 relations with Russia, 36–7 and Russian civil war, 173–5, 181–2, 186–8, 191, 193, 195, 199 British Columbia, 33, 38, 64 British Rail, 49 Bruce Lockhart, R. H., 176 bubonic plague, 76, 126 bulldozers, 239 Bunge, Nikolai, 26, 62 Burr, Malcolm, 209–10 Buryats, 166 Canada, and Russian civil war, 188 Canadian Pacific railroad, 37, 116, 136 Canadian transcontinental railroad, 1, 38, 94 canals, 13, 82 Cape–Cairo railway, 75 carriages all-metal, 222 church carriages, 111, 133, 158, 170 decoration of, 206 numbers of, 118 Pullman, 116 Stalin’s, 212, 252 carters, 14 Central Pacific Railroad, 79 Changchun, 164, 214 Chelyabinsk, 64, 72–4, 82, 84, 101, 150–1 Czech incident, 176–9 industrialization, 217–18, 225 Chelyabinsk–Omsk line, 65 Chelyabinsk tariff break, 159 Cherepanov, Yefim and Miron, 12 Chevkin, Constantine V., 29–31, 33–4 Chicago Daily News, 209 China Boxer Rising, 72, 127–30 communist revolution, 229 and Manchuria, 213–15, 229–30 railway construction, 68–72, 122–30, 233 and Russian foreign policy, 36–8, 145, 165–9 Chinese Eastern Railway, xv, 94, 98, 121, 134, 165 construction, 68–72, 122–9 costs, 127, 135 fares, 164 improvement programme, 129, 132 and Russian civil war, 175, 181–2, 191–2, 209, 213–14 and Russo-Japanese War, 131–2, 139, 166–7 struggle for control, 212–16, 229–30 Chita, 33, 71, 79, 88, 122, 155, 161, 200, 257 station architecture, 92 cholera, 54, 76, 126, 150 Chulim, river, 105 churches, building of, 157–8, 170 Circum-Baikal Railway, 65, 78, 90, 96, 121, 161, 228, 234 completion, 131, 134–7, 161 costs, 135 and Peking–Paris road race, 162–3 Cixi, Dowager Empress, 128 Clark, Rev.

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Dr Francis, 108, 115–17 coal, 27, 31, 159, 173, 207 thefts of, 119–20 wartime supplies, 217–18, 225 Collins, Perry McDonough, 31–2 communism, collapse of, 247–8, 257, 259 Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, 163–4, 209, 212 Constantine, Grand Duke, 32 containerization, 255–6 convicts, runaway, 6–7 copper deposits, 235 Cossacks, 127, 133, 182–6 cotton production, 218 Crimea, 199 Crimean War, 24–5, 31, 34, 37, 41, 73 Crossrail, 44 Cuba, 238 Czech Legion, 176–83, 187–9, 191–2, 198–9 Czechoslovakia, 176 dacha traffic, 27–8 Dalny (Dalian), 123, 164 de Windt, Harry, 5, 114–15, 117 death penalty, 8–9 Decembrists, 14, 35 Denmark, 158 diligences, 3 Doctor Zhivago, 193 Donbas (Donets Basin), 27, 217, 225 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 15 Duff, Thomas, 29–30 Duma, 139–40 dysentery, 17 earthquakes, 233, 241 East China Sea, 123 Egypt, 59 Eiffel Tower, 109–10, 194 Ekaterinadar (Krasnodar), 184 Elizabeth Petrovna, Empress, 8–9 Engineer, The, 94 engineers, Russian, 19–20 Erie Railroad, 17 étapes, 10 exile system, 8–11, 220 factories, wire-making, 254 famine, 146, 205, 210, 222 Far East Fleet, Russian, 126 ferries, 4, 90–1, 101, 103, 106, 121 Figes, Orlando, 177, 183, 189, 192 films, Soviet, 204–5 Finland, 174 First American Transcontinental Railroad, 2, 64, 67, 79, 244 First World War, xvi, 9, 137, 154, 158, 161, 172, 218, 225 Fleming, Peter, 180, 182, 186, 190, 195, 201 France expansionist policies, 123 and Russian civil war, 173–4, 181, 183, 191 freight tariff, national, 52 Frolov, Pyotr, 12 garden cities, 155–6 gas fields, 235, 246 Geneva Convention, 234 Germany expansionist policies, 123–3 export market, 158 invasion of Russia, 224–5, 232, 258 Gerstner, Franz von, 14–17 global warming, 247 gold, tsar’s, 196, 199 Golden Horn, 79 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 226, 244, 248 grain, 27, 54–5, 159, 218, 222 Graves, Major General William S., 181–3, 185–8, 190, 193 Great Khingan Range, 125–6 Greece, 59 Greener, William Oliver, 100–1, 107, 157 Guide to the Great Siberian Railway, 102, 112–13, 159 Guizzardi, Ettore, 162–3 Gulags, 220–2, 226, 259 and BAM, 231–2, 234–5, 244, 246 Hampshire Regiment, 188, 199 Harbin, 123, 125–6, 138, 164, 191, 209, 214, 230 Russification, 165–6 Hartman (conspirator), 51 Hartmann, Mr, 38 Haywood, Richard, 24 Helsinki, 25 Hiroshima atomic bomb, 229 Hitler, Adolf, 194 Holy Druzhina, 51 Hong Kong, 186 Horn, Mr, 31 Howard, Ebenezer, 155–6 Hubbenet, Adolf von, 44, 53–4, 59 Hungary, 16 hunghutzes (‘redbeards’), 127–8 ice floes, 4, 106 Ignatiev, Count Alexei, 40–1 Iman, river, 87 Imperator Alexander II bridge, 42, 73 Imperial School of Engineering, 20 India, 37, 59 Ingoda, river, 88 Inter-Allied Railway Agreement, 191–2, 214 Intourist, 253 Irkutsk and civil war, 180, 182, 198–9 connection to Lake Baikal, 66, 89, 101 and early railway schemes, 30, 38–41 and electrification of line, 218, 228–9, 251 governor-general of, 162 panorama, 110 population increase, 155, 219 prison, 78 and railway route, 65–6, 84–6, 102 and railway timetable, 103 and Russo-Japanese War, 133–4 station architecture, 92 travellers and, 8, 32, 103, 106, 115, 140, 164 Irkutsk county, fires in, 243 iron and steel industry, 13, 20, 52, 217 Irtysh, river, 81–2 Italy, and Russian civil war, 181 Izvestiya, 238 Japan and containerization, 255 and First World War, 175, 181, 201 and Manchuria, 213–16, 223–4 and railway construction, 70–2 and Russian civil war, 173–5, 181–4, 187, 191–2, 199–201 and Russian foreign policy, 36–7, 145 and Second World War, 224, 229–30 Tsarevich’s visit, 59–60 war with China, 70–1 war with Soviet Union, 229, 234 see also Russo-Japanese War Jefferson, Richard, 105–8 Jews, 51, 54, 141, 185, 190 Kaganovich, Lazar, 221–3 Kalmykov, Ivan, 182–5, 192, 200 Kama, river, 42 Kamchatka, 8, 254 Kankrin, Count Yegor, 14, 16 Karaganda, 218, 225 Kazakhs, 147 Kazakhstan, 7, 12, 42, 218, 225 Kazan, 29, 39, 203 Kemorovo, 156 Kerbedz, Stanislav, 125 Kerensky Provisional Government, 174–6, 188, 194 Khabarovsk, 66, 69, 79, 87, 101, 121, 168, 216, 257 and civil war, 183–4, 187, 209, 212 damaged bridge, 209, 212 population increase, 219 and railway administration, 120 Khabarovski Krai, 245 Khalkhin Gol, Battle of, 224 Khilkov, Prince Mikhail, 89–91, 102, 108–9, 111–12, 151 inspects completed line, 135–6 Khor, river, 87 Khrushchev, Nikita, 234, 255 Kiev, 25, 222 Kirghiz horses, 112 Kleinmichel, Count, 21 Knox, General Alfred, 187–8, 193 Kolchak, Admiral Aleksandr, 184–90, 192, 194–9, 203, 205 Komsomol, 236–7, 247 Komsomolsk-na-Amure, 231, 233, 242 Korea, 7, 130, 137–8, 214 Korff, Baron Andrei, 41 Kotlin island, 90 Kougoulsky, Boris, 184 Krasnoyarsk, 84–6, 102–3, 106, 155, 255 station architecture, 92 Kronstadt, 90 Kuibyshev, 226 see also Samara kulaks, 146, 222 Kulomzin, Anatoly, 144–5, 147, 149, 151, 153, 157–8 Kultuk, 135 Kuropatkin, General Aleksey, 140 Kuznets Basin, 217–19, 225 Kuznetsk, 156 Kuznetsovsk Tunnel, 248 Kwantung Army, 224 Ladrintsev, Nikolai, 35 Lake Baikal and civil war, 187 and early railway schemes, 30, 33, 36, 40–1 environmental damage, 243–5, 249 ferry service, 84, 90–1, 101, 121, 129 and railway route, 65–6, 69 replacement of lakeside route, 228–8 Russo-Japanese War, 132–3 storms on, 135 temporary tracks across, 90–1, 132–3 travellers and, 108, 162, 164 see also Baikal Amur Railway (BAM); Circum-Baikal Railway; Transbaikal Railway Lake Khasan, 224 Laue, Theodore von, 43 Le Matin, 162 League of Nations, 216 Lee, Mrs John Clarence, 164–5 Legras, Jules, 151, 155 Lenin, V.

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He was born in Moscow in the year the first major section of the Trans-Siberian was completed, fought against the Austrians in the Carpathian Mountains in the First World War and considered joining the White forces in 1918, a story I relate in the book; but, fortunately (not least for me), he fled to France instead, and later the United States and Britain. I also dedicate this book to little Alfie, born 114 years later, who already seems to love trains. ONE A SLOW EMBRACE There were many reasons for Russia not to have built the Trans-Siberian Railway – and very few to build it. While by 1869 America boasted a transcontinental railway and Canada, more relevantly, followed suit sixteen years later, Russia was different. Unlike most of Europe, which had embraced liberalism to accommodate the needs of industrial growth, Russia remained an absolute monarchy ruled by a conservative tsar through a political system that made no concessions to democracy.

pages: 603 words: 186,210

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time
by Stephen Fried
Published 23 Mar 2010

But the railroad industry’s unprecedented power carried equally unprecedented risks. In the early fall of 1872, Fred started noticing that in every city he visited, the local papers carried bigger and bigger stories about a financial scandal involving the builders of the transcontinental railroad. Union Pacific executives were accused of looting profits from the transcontinental railroad through a questionable company they created and gave a foreign-sounding name: Crédit Mobilier. Not only did this company receive no-bid contracts to build much of the railroad, but several members of Congress who voted on train funding were allowed to buy Crédit Mobilier stock at bargain rates.

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In Leavenworth’s case, they had all fallen apart, and the town’s leaders—many of whom were now Fred’s friends—watched in dismay as much smaller Kansas towns, like Lawrence and Topeka, got train service first. Leavenworth had once come close to snagging the biggest railroad deal in the country, spending over $4 million ($88 million) lobbying in Washington to ensure the High Iron of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad came right through the city and the fort. It was during the nationwide competition for the right to build a railroad from the Missouri River all the way to the Pacific, which pitted three different companies, and three different routes, against one another. But in 1862 the Lincoln administration chose the route championed by the Union Pacific—which ran two hundred miles to the north of Leavenworth, through Omaha.

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All the young railroads being built in Kansas would use Kansas City as their main eastern hub instead of Leavenworth. Still, in November 1866, the city did get some train service at last—but just a minor branch line. The Kansas Pacific—the local division of the company chosen to build the transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific—laid tracks between Leavenworth and Lawrence, where passengers could change trains onto the High Iron to go east to Kansas City, or west through Topeka all the way to Fort Riley and Junction City. Leavenworth had finally joined the modern world. And Fred Harvey was no longer a railroad ticket seller in a city without trains.

pages: 408 words: 105,715

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
by Jing Tsu
Published 18 Jan 2022

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT By the 1870s, Chinese laborers: Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 10. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT They made up 90 percent: “Forgotten Workers: Chinese Migrants and the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad,” online exhibition at the Natural Museum of American History, https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/forgotten-workers-chinese-migrants-and-building-transcontinental-railroad-event-exhib-6332. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The carnivalesque Joy Zone: Panama-Pacific International Exposition 1915 Souvenir Guide (San Francisco: Souvenir Guide Publishers, ca. 1915), p. 15.

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Drawn by pamphlets and flyers that mythologized the rich bounties of the golden hills of California, Chinese immigrants poured into San Francisco to work in the gold mines during the 1849 gold rush. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese coolies worked on the transcontinental railway from 1865 to 1869. By the 1870s, Chinese laborers accounted for one-fourth of the workers in California. They made up 90 percent of the labor force that built the transcontinental railway that connected Sacramento, California, and Promontory, Utah. It was backbreaking work that few American laborers wanted to do: shoveling twenty pounds of rocks about four hundred times every day.

pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

Rather, that year marks the start of our saga, for the Civil War provides a sharp historical marker separating the antebellum and postbellum ages. A tale of economic progress needs numbers to document that progress, and the raw data of economics became much more adequate with the first Census of Manufacturing, carried out in 1869, a year that coincidentally brought the nation together when the transcontinental railroad was joined at Promontory Summit in Utah. Our starting point in 1870 should not be taken to diminish the progress that had been made in the previous half century. A newborn child in 1820 entered a world that was almost medieval: a dim world lit by candlelight, in which folk remedies treated health problems and in which travel was no faster than that possible by hoof or sail.

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A correspondent in Chicago caught exactly the spirit that had brought the whole country together. The festivity … “was free from the atmosphere of warlike energy and the suggestions of suffering, danger, and death which threw their oppressive shadow over the celebrations of our victories during the war for the Union.”9 The joining together of the nation through a transcontinental railroad and instantaneous telegraphic communication together symbolize how much the American standard of living had improved by 1870. After millennia in which the life of rural farmers remained little changed since the days of ancient Rome, the First Industrial Revolution had begun to spread its bounty in many directions before 1870, particularly in the form of steam engines, cotton gins, railroads, steamships, telegraphic communications, and rudimentary agricultural machinery that greatly eased the burden of human labor on the farm.

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In contrast to the single transcontinental line from Omaha to Sacramento linked together in the historic 1869 ceremony, by 1893 there were seven transcontinental lines, of which three were relatively close together, traversing Kansas and Nebraska, and two were quite close together in their paths through the sparsely populated Dakotas and Montana.12 The building of the transcontinental railroads is a tale of ambitious entrepreneurs, leverage and shady finance, and repeated business failures that twice contributed to financial panics that dragged the nation’s economy into major depressions.13 A common theme in commentaries on the late nineteenth-century railroad industry is “overbuilding,” and indeed, by 1900 there were no less than six different railroad lines available to transport passengers from Chicago to Minneapolis or Omaha.14 Data on passenger-miles of railroad traffic are shown in figure 5–2.

pages: 482 words: 147,281

A Crack in the Edge of the World
by Simon Winchester
Published 9 Oct 2006

These were the trails – from Memphis to California across Texas, from St Louis to California across Utah, from Hannibal along the valley of the Platte River towards Oregon, and from Chicago up across the peaks of Montana and via the empty rain-shadowed waste lands to the tiny army encampment at Fort Walla Walla – from which the roadbeds for all of America’s future surface links would be formed. The routes of the telegraph cables, the tracks of the Pony Express, the Wells Fargo stagecoach lines, the transcontinental railroads, the two-lane and then four-lane highways – Route 66 most legendary among them – and then the roads of the Interstate System of today – all of them first followed the routes that those Gold Rush migrants had taken, once John Marshall’s find had cried its havoc, and the newcomers had slipped their traces and begun.

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The city fathers also turned a blind eye to the Barbary Coast’s legendary ‘cowyards’, assembly-line brothels that provided sexual services on a titanic scale. The Hotel Nymphomania, for example, offered 150 cubicles on each of its three floors. The water company, the gas-light providers, the local railways and even the big transcontinental railroad companies all found it more convenient to see that city officials were kept happy, fat and replete than to worry too much about the niceties of democratic needs and popular demands. Ruef himself was paid monthly retainers of up to $400 in unreceipted cash by all the corporations wishing to do business with the city.

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San Francisco Coroner’s Office: A History 1850–1980. San Francisco: Redactors’ Press, 1999 Asbury, Herbert. The Barbary Coast. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933 Bailey, Janet. The Great San Francisco Trivia and Fact Book. Nashville: Cumberland House, 1999 Bain, David Howard. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999 Bally, Albert W., and Allison R. Palmer (eds.). The Geology of North America: An Overview. Boulder: Geological Society of America, 1989 Bancroft, Hubert Howe. Some Cities and San Francisco. New York: Bancroft, 1907 Barker, Malcolm E. Three Fearful Days.

pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

Other provisions of the bill addressed the capital stock of the company, the election of directors, and the conduct of board meetings. It also authorized the Central Pacific Railroad Company, a corporation already formed in California, to build in the other direction, eastward from the Pacific coast. The transcontinental railroad, Lincoln decided, would be built by corporations. Lincoln was deeply interested in the progress of the transcontinental railroad and kept abreast of developments throughout the remainder of his life. On January 20, 1865, just three months before his assassination, Lincoln, seeing that the Union Pacific was languishing in its construction of the railroad, met with Congressman Oakes Ames to discuss the situation.

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To be granted one, they had to convince the state that their businesses were not just profitable but also of benefit to the state itself. The East India Company promised Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 that it would act “for the honour of this our realm of England, as for the increase of our navigation.” The Union Pacific Railroad’s charter was granted by Congress in the middle of the Civil War. A transcontinental railroad, the company’s backers argued, would bind together a riven nation. In the last century, we have lost sight of the true spirit of corporate enterprise. We have elevated profit seeking from a means to an end to an end in itself. This shift was driven partially by law: by the twentieth century, corporations no longer had to petition monarchs for charters and instead could be created with the submission of some paperwork to the local authorities.

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Its twenty sections ran to ten pages and included dense provisions filled with discussions of meridians and longitudes and interest rates. It might not, on its face, have seemed particularly important in comparison with the other issues on Lincoln’s mind that day. But Lincoln knew better. This law, he believed, was essential to the future of the country. At long last, a transcontinental railroad would be built. Railroads had always been a cause dear to Lincoln’s heart. Before launching his career in politics, he had been a railroad lawyer, arguing on behalf of railroad companies and their interests in Illinois. In one of his most famous cases, he won a lawsuit protecting railroads that had laid bridges across rivers from being sued by the steamships that kept running into them.

Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America
by Henry Petroski
Published 2 Jan 1995

Increasing international commerce in the latter part of the nineteenth century created worldwide interest in a canal across Central America, to reduce the time and risk that ships took in transporting people and cargo between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. By 1855, a fifty-mile railroad across the Isthmus of Panama—the first transcontinental railroad—presented an alternative to the thousands of sea miles (and added perils) it took to get around the southernmost part of South America. Of course, unloading ship cargo onto railroad trains and reloading it onto ships at the other terminus was as costly as ferrying rail freight across rivers without bridges.

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Rudolphe Modrzejewski was born in Cracow, Poland, on January 27, 1861, the son of Gustav and Helena Modrzejewski, who, as Helena Modjeska, was to become known as “the première tragedienne of her time.” According to his mother’s memoirs, Rudolphe came to America with her for the first time in 1876, when they visited New York, Philadelphia, and the Centennial Exposition. As they crossed the Isthmus of Panama on the first transcontinental railroad, on their way to California, the young man declared that “someday he would build the Panama Canal.” Although she remembers him as “even then determined to become a civil engineer,” a career as a pianist was evidently also a possibility, for he had been well trained musically and was said to be a leading exponent of Chopin.

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In the meantime, negotiations were going back and forth between the Quebec and Phoenix companies, with the latter concerned about the financial status of the former. Detailed design work did not progress very quickly under such circumstances, for Phoenix was not assured of being paid for its services. It was not until 1903, when plans for a National Transcontinental Railway project were revealed, that a bridge at Quebec became such a necessity that government backing was assured. By then the government had also become more interested because of planning for the Quebec Tercentenary in 1908, and it was intimated that the bridge should be ready for the celebration.

pages: 404 words: 108,253

9Tail Fox
by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Published 19 Oct 2005

CHAPTER 27 Monday 1 March The school on Runyon Drive had been built in 1875 to educate the sons of the newly rich, and San Francisco in the late 1870s was a city firmly divided into the newly rich and those still desperate to join them. The great days of the gold rush were gone and sailing clippers no longer beached on the Bay shore, remaining there to rot as whole crews abandoned their watch to go in search of riches. Great faith had been placed in the transcontinental railroad and its ability to open San Francisco to the culture, sophistication and elegance of the East Coast. In the event, the railroad brought only disaster. Cheap goods flooded the city, putting whole neighbourhoods out of work. The track layers, mostly Chinese, thousands of whom had been injured, died in blasting accidents or burnt out their lives as indentured labour, found themselves blamed for the city’s plight.

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The Begley House was wood-framed and grey-painted, an octagonal turret set in the left corner to match the turret on the right corner of the house behind. It had been built for Theodore Begley, a sugar importer and tobacco merchant whose father was one of the few to realise what damage the transcontinental railway would do to trade in the city. While others celebrated the hammering of the final spike, Theodore’s father was busy buying up factories on the East Coast, ready to undercut not only himself but also his friends. The house his son built had a huge hall, reception room and dining room, seven bedrooms, two bathrooms and a small garden cut into Tamsin Hill and supported with field stone walls.

Great American Railroad Journeys
by Michael Portillo
Published 26 Jan 2017

BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS In the 1850s, battle was joined for the very soul of the railroad. The early pioneers were keen to press ahead, connecting and settling vast swathes of the west, and talk of a transcontinental railroad was commonplace. But that meant hostility from steamboat operators fearful about lost trade. The showdown at Rock Island was inevitable. Backers of a northern route for a transcontinental railroad saw Rock Island as the perfect spot for bridging the Mississippi. It lay in the centre of the river – the boundary between the cities of Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa – and would link the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad with the Mississippi & Missouri line.

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CONTENTS FOREWORD BY MICHAEL PORTILLO INTRODUCTION SECTION ONE THE EARLY YEARS Dreams & reality The pioneers Marvels & machinations in the mid-century SECTION TWO THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR Modern warfare Railroads in the south Railroads in the north Engine exploits Abraham Lincoln SECTION THREE ROBBER BARONS Cornelius Vanderbilt Jay Gould A rogues’ gallery Credit Mobilier SECTION FOUR RECONSTRUCTION & THE GILDED AGE The Transcontinental Railroad Regulation & railroads The Pennsylvania Railroad empire Comfort & safety Bridges & tunnels TIMELINE CONCLUSION PICTURE CREDITS INDEX FOREWORD Throughout the years of making rail journeys for BBC television, first in the United Kingdom and then on the continent of Europe, I had dreamed of carrying the programme’s concept to the United States.

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The seeds of the Credit Mobilier scandal had been sown. Doc Durant worked behind the scenes to maximise his personal profits, frequently at the expense of the American government. THE GAMBLE THAT NEVER WAS The Credit Mobilier scandal was born from a simple truth: the US government badly wanted a transcontinental railroad. But such a vast engineering project had to attract private investors. Many were unconvinced that eye-watering construction costs could be converted to long-term profit from train services. Chief amongst these sceptics was Thomas Durant, vice president of Union Pacific. Unlike other robber barons, he believed that the big dollars lay in building, rather than operating, the railroad – especially given the lucrative government subsidies, cheap loans, land grants and mineral rights a desperate Congress was throwing at its Big Idea.

pages: 523 words: 159,884

The Great Railroad Revolution
by Christian Wolmar
Published 9 Jun 2014

But then, to be fair, the notion of a three-thousand-mile transcontinental railroad at a time when there were barely a few dozen miles of line in the whole country could be conceived only by those with a fervent imagination. Various enthusiasts began to pick up on the idea. There was, for example, John Plumbe, a Welsh engineer who had moved to the United States in the 1820s and in 1836 began to examine possible routes for the line from his home in Wisconsin, then still a territory rather than a state. Rather presciently, Plumbe, best remembered as a pioneer of photographic techniques, argued that a transcontinental railroad “would hasten the formation of dense settlements throughout the whole extent of the road, advance the sales of the public lands, afford increased facilities to the agricultural, commercial and mining interests of the country . . . and enable the government to transport troops and munitions of war.”

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A key factor was that it eventually had control of its own metals all the way between Chicago and the West Coast, whereas other companies had to use tracks belonging to other railroads, which would invariably prioritize their own services. Meanwhile, two other transcontinental railroads had been built to the north. These were epic affairs, on a scale with the original transcontinental. The Northern Pacific was a completely separate enterprise from its southern namesake and one that suffered, like its predecessor, from constant cash shortages that delayed progress. On the same day in July 1864 that Durant’s bribery had obtained from Congress those generous arrangements for the financing of the Union Pacific, the lawmakers also granted a charter and land to a second transcontinental railroad, with a route from the shores of Lake Superior in Minnesota to the northern Pacific coast.

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See Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Burlington Trials, 199 Buses, 303, 331 Bush, George W., 326 Business travel, 263 Caldwell, Charles, 35 California Northwestern Railroad, 283 California Zephyr, 327, 329, 345 Calkins, Earnest Elmo, 268 Camden & Amboy Railroad, 23, 30, 52, 60, 82, 108, 161, 219 accident, and Vanderbilt, 80–81, 240 and locomotive technology, 42–46 Canada, xxvii, 53, 96, 178, 252, 287, 288, 309, 325, 358 Canals, 4, 8, 12–13, 19, 27, 29–31, 47, 53, 65, 84–85, 217, 228 Carnegie, Andrew, 98 Carpetbaggers, 163 Carriages, 44–45, 73–76 all-steel, 200, 212 classes of, 73 lighting and heating, 210, 269 and stoves, 75 and toilets, 44, 185 See also Dining cars; Pullman cars; Sleeping cars Carroll, Charles, 1, 20, 22 Cascade Tunnel, 287, 310 Casement, John and Daniel, 138–140, 143, 146, 152 Cassatt, Alexander, 261–262, 285 Catch Me Who Can, 14 Catholic Total Abstinence Society, 256 Causey Arch, 3 Central Ohio Railroad, 113 Central Pacific Railroad, 124, 175 and corruption, 128, 132–134, 144, 156–158 death toll, 142 and meeting of railways, 57, 150–152 and Native Americans, 147, 202 and transcontinental railroad, 128, 130, 131–158 workforce, 141–142, 143–144, 146, 150–152, 160 Central Railroad of Michigan, 49 Central Railroad of New Jersey, 213, 310 Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, 19–22, 32–34, 60, 91, 125, 216 Charlotte Dundas, 5 Chattanooga, 104, 109, 112–114 Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, 10 Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, 248, 299, 347 Chesterfield Railroad, 23 Chicago commuter services, 353 elevated railways, 279 jazz culture, 302 as rail hub, 68–72, 86–87 stockyards, 255, 302 and Transcontinental railroad, 153, 155 Tremont House Hotel, 182 Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railroad, 335 Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (Burlington), 70, 168–169, 171–172, 199, 246–247, 305, 335, 349 gas-engine trials, 310 prestige services, 310–312, 325, 328 Chicago, Milwaukee, St.

pages: 283 words: 81,163

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present
by Thomas J. Dilorenzo
Published 9 Aug 2004

During the congressional debates over federal subsidies for transcontinental railroads in 1862, a New Mexico politician complained that “the wrangle of local interests” was such that many congressmen would not support the subsidy bill unless the railroad “starts in the corner of every man’s farm and runs through all his neighbors’ plantations” in every part of the state.15 The concerns of the man from New Mexico were not unfounded. Indeed, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania “had received a block of . . . stock in exchange for his vote,” writes Dee Brown in his popular history of the transcontinental railroads. Stevens also “demanded insertion of a clause [in the railroad bill] requiring that all iron used in the construction and equipment of said road to be American manufacture.

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There was no government-imposed “right of eminent domain” in New Hampshire, but the private railroad company was not hindered: it simply purchased rights of way. Similarly, the Mormons built four railroads in Utah without any government subsidies. And as will be seen in Chapter 7, in the late nineteenth century entrepreneur James J. Hill built a transcontinental railroad that was not subsidized. Hill’s privately financed railroad was built better, had a more direct route, and was more profitable than the government-subsidized transcontinental railroads with which he competed, most of which went bankrupt at some point because they were so mired in government regulation and crippled by the inherent inefficiencies of all government-financed or -sponsored “public works” programs.

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HOW TO BUILD A RAILROAD Most business historians have assumed that the transcontinental railroads would never have been built without government subsidies. The free market would have failed to provide the adequate capital, or so the theory asserts. The evidence for this theory is that the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads, which were completed in the years after the War Between the States, received per-mile subsidies from the federal government in the form of low-interest loans as well as massive land grants. But there need not be cause and effect here: the subsidies were not needed to cause the transcontinental railroads to be built. We know this because, just as many roads and canals were privately financed in the early nineteenth century, a market entrepreneur built his own transcontinental railroad.

pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Published 23 Sep 2019

Dumont, Louis (1980). Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. 2nd revised edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dunkerly, James (1988). Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America. London: Verso. Duran, Xavier (2012). “The First US Transcontinental Railroad: Expected Profits and Government Intervention.” Journal of Economic History 73, no. 1: 177–200. Durham, M. Edith (1909). High Albania. London: Edward Arnold. ——— (1928). Some Tribal Origins, Laws and Customs of the Balkans. London: George Allen and Unwin. Dutt, Romesh C. (1916).

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We saw in Chapter 1 how the Union Pacific railway, as soon as it constructed the track in Wyoming, founded the city of Cheyenne and began to sell off the land. None of this required new spending, so the federal government did not need to raise taxes. The public-private partnership strategy to build the transcontinental railway wasn’t just about spending as little government money as possible. It also aimed at shackling the budding American Leviathan. It focused on incentivizing the private sector to do work that in other parts of the world might have been done by the government, so that the state did not grow too big or too powerful.

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Ohio judgment is at http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/367/643.html. We quote from Morgan (1975): “having little interest” (238), and “if any slave resist” (312). See John (1995, 1997) on the importance of the post office, and see Larson (2001) on infrastructure more broadly and Duran (2012) for the economic impact of the transcontinental railway. Acemoglu, Moscona, and Robinson (2016) provide econometric evidence that the creation of post offices and appointment of postmasters stimulated patenting and thus innovation in the nineteenth-century United States. The quote from Zorina Khan is from that paper, and also see Khan (2009).

pages: 404 words: 118,759

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 20 Mar 2014

Walker, “Economic Opportunity on the Urban Frontier: Wealth and Nativity in Early San Francisco,” Explorations in Economic History 37.3 (2000), pp. 258–277; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986 [1985]), p. 131; and David J. St. Clair, “The Gold Rush and the Beginnings of California Industry,” California History 77.4 (Winter, 1998/1999), pp. 185–208. The Civil War would Origins of transcontinental railroad: Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), pp. 17–22, and David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Penguin, 2000 [1999]), pp. 3–118. Messianic rhetoric and anticipation: William Deverell, “Redemptive California? Re-thinking the Post–Civil War,” Rethinking History 11.1 (March 2007), pp. 65–66.

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Aside from this hefty contribution, however, California’s role in the conflict was limited. No serious fighting reached the coast, and Lincoln never applied the draft west of Iowa and Kansas, partly in a bid to keep the Far West loyal. The Civil War would be a boon to California: not only by increasing its wealth but by bringing the dream of a transcontinental railroad closer to reality. Although a railway to the Pacific had been debated for decades, Congress didn’t lay the legislative foundations until the war made it possible to sell the idea as a matter of military necessity. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 took the first step, chartering two private companies to build the tracks, and subsidizing the venture with land grants and federal bonds.

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Ina Coolbrith around 1871, when she was about thirty. This kind of puffery felt crass in light of the city’s new sophistication. The past year had boosted San Francisco’s prosperity and prestige. An influx of easterners had invigorated its culture. The Civil War had made it rich, and set in motion the construction of the transcontinental railroad, whose western span workers began building that year. The Era had dominated the first phase; now a new periodical was needed, as San Francisco’s Bohemians came into their own. Building a better paper would bring Twain, Harte, and Stoddard closer together. They went from being acquaintances to friends, from colleagues in the Era’s crowded firmament to co-conspirators in a literary crusade of their own.

Frommer's San Francisco 2012
by Matthew Poole , Erika Lenkert and Kristin Luna
Published 4 Oct 2011

dateline 1542 Juan Cabrillo sails up the California coast. 1579 Sir Francis Drake lands near San Francisco, missing the entrance to the bay. 1769 Members of the Spanish expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá become the first Europeans to see San Francisco Bay. 1775 The San Carlos is the first European ship to sail into San Francisco Bay. 1776 Captain Juan Bautista de Anza establishes a presidio (military fort); San Francisco de Asís Mission opens. 1821 Mexico wins independence from Spain and annexes California. 1835 The town of Yerba Buena develops around the port; the United States tries unsuccessfully to purchase San Francisco Bay from Mexico. 1846 Mexican-American War. 1847 Americans annex Yerba Buena and rename it San Francisco. 1848 Gold is discovered in Coloma, near Sacramento. 1849 In the year of the gold rush, San Francisco’s population swells from about 800 to 25,000. 1851 Lawlessness becomes acute before attempts are made to curb it. 1869 The transcontinental railroad reaches San Francisco. 1873 Andrew S. Hallidie invents the cable car. 1906 The Great Earthquake strikes, and the resulting fire levels the city. 1915 The Panama Pacific International Exposition celebrates San Francisco’s restoration and the completion of the Panama Canal. 1936 The Bay Bridge is built. 1937 The Golden Gate Bridge is completed. 1945 The United Nations Charter is drafted and adopted by the representatives of 50 countries meeting in San Francisco. 1950 The Beat Generation moves into the bars and cafes of North Beach. 1967 A free concert in Golden Gate Park attracts 20,000 people, ushering in the Summer of Love and the hippie era. 1974 BART’s high-speed transit system opens the tunnel linking San Francisco with the East Bay. 1978 Harvey Milk, a city supervisor and America’s first openly gay politician, is assassinated, along with Mayor George Moscone, by political rival Dan White. 1989 An earthquake registering 7.1 on the Richter scale hits San Francisco during a World Series baseball game, as 100 million watch on TV; the city quickly rebuilds. 1991 Fire rages through the Berkeley/Oakland hills, destroying 2,800 homes. 1993 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts opens. 1995 New San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opens. 1996 Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown elected mayor of San Francisco. 2000 Pacific Bell Park (now AT&T Park), the new home to the San Francisco Giants, opens. 2002 The San Francisco Giants make it to the World Series but lose to the Anaheim Angels in Game 7. 2004 Thirty-six-year-old supervisor Gavin Newsom becomes the city’s 42nd mayor and quickly makes headlines by authorizing City Hall to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

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Oakland 10 miles E of San Francisco Although it’s less than a dozen miles from San Francisco, Oakland is worlds apart from its sister city across the bay. Originally little more than a cluster of ranches and farms, Oakland exploded in size and stature practically overnight, when the last mile of transcontinental railroad track was laid down. Major shipping ports soon followed and, to this day, Oakland remains one of the busiest industrial ports on the West Coast. The price for economic success, however, is Oakland’s lowbrow reputation as a predominantly working-class city; it is forever in the shadow of chic San Francisco.

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Speculation on the newly established San Francisco stock exchange could make or destroy an investor in a single day, and several noteworthy writers (including Mark Twain) were among the young men forever influenced by the boomtown spirit. The American Civil War left California firmly in the Union camp, ready, willing, and able to receive hordes of disillusioned soldiers fed up with the internecine war-mongering of the eastern seaboard. In 1869, the transcontinental railway linked the eastern and western seaboards of the United States, ensuring the fortunes of the barons who controlled it. The railways, however, also shifted economic power bases as cheap manufactured goods from the east undercut the high prices hitherto charged for goods that sailed or steamed their way around the tip of South America.

pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World
by Jonathan Hillman
Published 28 Sep 2020

On May 10, 1869, Leland Stanford, a California business magnate, drove a golden stake into the ground at Promontory Summit, Utah, connecting the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railways and completing the world’s first transcontinental railway. For a country that had been at war with itself four years earlier, the railway was a potent symbol. The United States was healing divisions, racing west to fulfill its destiny, and conquering time and space with new technologies. Only later would the railway’s true costs become clearer.25 The United States’ transcontinental railways were not kind to those who lived in their path or to those who built them. Carrying troops and settlers, the railways expedited the breakup and deaths of western Native tribes.

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See Britain/United Kingdom United Nations (UN): alliance of China and Russia on Security Council, (i); Asian Highway Network (AHN), (i); compared to 17+1 format, (i); development agenda of 2030, (i); South Sudan peacekeeping operations, (i); on Sri Lanka civil war casualties, (i); “trans-Asian” railway proposed by, (i), (ii) United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), (i)n16 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, (i) United States: alternatives to Chinese investment offered by, (i); BUILD Act (2018), (i); Central Intelligence Agency, (i); Chinese workers on U.S. transcontinental railway, (i); Department of Defense Central Command (CENTCOM), (i); foreign aid policy under Bolton, (i); foreign aid to Southeast Asia, (i); highway system development in, (i); International Development Finance Corporation (USDFC), (i); Pacific Railway Act (1862), (i); policing corruption of its companies abroad, (i); Russian meddling in elections of, (i); Silk Road Strategy Act (1999), (i), (ii), (iii)n68; State Department’s goals in Pakistan, (i); transcontinental railway, (i), (ii), (iii); U-2 flights during Cold War, (i).

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The script has been flipped, although as with all historical comparisons, there are important differences. New technologies open avenues for influence, while international institutions and norms moderate today’s global connectivity competition. To understand these challenges, there is no better year to begin than 1869, when three megaprojects shrank the world. The U.S. transcontinental railway, the Suez Canal, and the Indo-European Telegraph leveraged new technologies to carry people, goods, and information faster than ever before. In the West, these projects are popularly remembered as symbols of progress. In hindsight, the story looks very different, not only from the perspective of the weaker states, which often sacrificed political autonomy for relatively little economically, but also from the vantage point of the great powers themselves, whose overwhelming drive to build and expand concealed risks lurking beneath the surface.

pages: 81 words: 28,090

The Story of the Pony Express
by Glenn D. Bradley
Published 1 Jan 1913

Because of this empty title, the nickname, "Duke," was ever afterward given him. When Maximilian's soap bubble monarchy had disappeared, Gwin finally returned to California where he passed his old age in retirement. [18] Senate documents. [19]All parties in California were unanimous in their desire for a transcontinental railroad. No political faction there could receive any support unless it strongly endorsed this project. [20] The signers of this petition were: Robert C. Rogers, Macondray & Co., Jno. Sime & Co., J. B. Thomas, W. W. Stow, Horace P. James, Geo. F. Bragg & Co., Flint, Peabody & Co., Wm. B. Johnston, D.

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The golden era of the overland stage business was from 1858 to 1866. After that, the old through routes were but fragments "between the tracks" of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific roads which were building East and West toward each other. Wells Fargo & Co., however, clung to these fragments until the lines met on May 10th, 1869, and a continuous transcontinental railroad was completed. Then they turned their attention to organizing mountain stage and express lines in the railroadless regions of the West,--some of which still exist. And they also turned their energies to the railway express business, in which capacity this great firm, the last of the old stage companies, is now known the world over

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That the Company changed hands in 1861 is not surprising. While the Pony Express failed in a financial way; it had served the country faithfully and well. It had aided an imperiled Government, helped to tranquilize and retain to the Union a giant commonwealth, and it had shown the practicability of building a transcontinental railroad, and keeping it open for traffic regardless of winter snows. All this Pony Express did and more. It marked the supreme triumph of American spirit, of God-fearing, man-defying American pluck and determination--qualities which have always characterized the winning of the West. [41] Senate Documents.

pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

Improved roads or rigging could only improve productivity a little, since hooves or sails could only go so fast. Productivity increased when steamships replaced sails, not only because steamboats could go faster than sailboats in inland waterways, but also because they could sail upstream as well as downstream. The transcontinental railroad reduced the time it took to transport people and goods across the continent from six months to six days.9 The addition of local lines gradually plugged a larger proportion of the country’s human and physical resources into a national rail line and dramatically increased the flow of people and goods around the country.

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MILES OF RAILROAD BUILT 1890 – 1940 Railroads reduced the cost of moving stuff around: according to one estimate, by 1890 the cost of rail freight was $0.875 a ton-mile compared with $24.50 per ton-mile for wagon freight, a reduction of 96 percent. They speeded up connections: the transcontinental railroad reduced the time it took to get across the continent from six months to six days. They also boosted reliability: you could more or less guarantee that you would get to where you were going on time. Trains could pull dozens of wagons’ worth of stuff: David Wells calculated that, in 1887, the country’s railway freight was equivalent to every person carrying a thousand tons one mile or every ton a thousand miles.6 Railways also acted as industrial stimulants in their own right.

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In the West, they were often the only providers of transportation—and like all monopolists they exploited their power to extract the maximum rent from their clients. The pioneering railroad in the region was the Union Pacific, which was chartered by Abraham Lincoln in 1862. The Union Pacific formed America’s first transcontinental railroad when it met up with the Central Pacific Railroad on May 10, 1869. It quickly built or acquired additional lines, which provided it with links to most of the region’s great (or soon to be great) cities: Salt Lake City, Denver, and Portland. The extension of America’s rail network to the West turned the country into an agricultural superpower, opening up new markets ever farther west, and turning the Midwest into the breadbasket of not only America but the world.

pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

Indeed, some of the activity had little to do with the war but reinforced big-picture ideas of the modern Republic, continental ambitions that predated the conflict. From the time of the Gold Rush, the idea of connecting the Pacific Coast to the East via a large railroad had been a dream of both capitalists and politicians. But there had been a problem: Southerners wanted the route to run through the South. With larger political issues looming, the transcontinental railroad had not been approved during the 1850s. But in the summer of 1862, the emboldened federal government, in the absence of Southern elements in the House and the Senate, approved the Pacific Railway Act. While the South was rationing its iron, here was the North embarking on a railroad experiment to connect the continent.

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The Pacific Railway Act, with a combination of land grants and bond guarantees, allowed for private interests to begin the construction of a railroad. Starting from the West, the rights to build fell to a group of Sacramento merchants, led by Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford, men who had arrived and prospered with the Gold Rush. By the end of the decade, the transcontinental railroad would allow a passenger embarking in New York to arrive in San Francisco in less than a dozen days. But the lingering effects of the Gold Rush benefited the North in another way. With paper currency used internally, the federal Treasury and eastern banks had ample physical gold holdings that had made their way to the East Coast during the gold rush.

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It was here in this paper temple that the best operators of the era, such as Jay Gould, could—without leaving the island of Manhattan—end up controlling far-flung enterprises that had taken the toil of thousands to build. Through dealings in the stock market, Gould engaged in corporate gamesmanship of the highest order and ended up in control of major railroads and telegraph operations. Gould’s boardroom battles and intrigues—which included the Erie Railroad, Western Union, and one half of the first transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific—often played out in the newspapers, highlighting the power of the knowing men on Wall Street to determine the fate of so many through the control of financial instruments. At the same time, even the young prospector who might have ventured to the oil fields in search of easy money could participate by taking sides, by buying his own few shares of stock.

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

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pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Walker in The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California, “and it could be pushed along by remarkable innovations coming from irrigation engineers, machinists, and plant scientists.”19 Among those innovations Walker lists new and improved plant and animal breeds; locally produced farm machinery like new plows, harvesters, and later the caterpillar tractor tread; irrigation tools like concrete dams and water pumps; and the first enclosed chicken hutch and cattle feedlot. In-state manufacturers had an edge, at least until the transcontinental railroad was completed, in 1869, and California’s ironworks absorbed its share of agricultural capital. Still, monoculture for the world market was a wobbly economic foundation, and financialization was a double-edged sword. A run on the Bank of California in 1875 wiped out its deposits, and the firm’s founder, William C.

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Even one thousand dollars, well applied, may, with resolute industry and frugality, place you soon on the high road to independence.”2 Greeley especially hoped more women would make the trip, to even out the gender ratio and provide the domestic basis for permanent U.S. settlement. The book concludes with a full-throated call for a transcontinental railroad, financed via the inexhaustible promise of unsettled lands near the tracks. Lincoln’s Republican Party supported the idea, as did a group of southern Democrats led by Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. The 1854 Gadsden Purchase of a small slice of territory in northern Mexico cleared the way for a transcontinental route south of the forbidding Sierra Nevada mountain range.

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If the whole project went bust then the workers were out of luck, losing their work and time the way investors lost money. As long as you were willing to overlook the uncompensated expropriation of the land around the railroad tracks by the U.S. authorities—and everyone involved in the financing certainly was—a joint-stock transcontinental railroad sounds like a good deal all around. Global capital gets to be of productive use, profiting both professional financiers and the Atlantic’s lounging bourgeois investors. Enterprising small California capitalists elevated themselves, compensated appropriately for their assumed risk and filling the vacuum where, after the collapse of the cattle barons, a new Anglo West Coast aristocracy was required.

Shotguns and Stagecoaches: The Brave Men Who Rode for Wells Fargo in the Wild West
by John Boessenecker
Published 30 Oct 2018

It carried letters, packages, and valuables, not passengers. For the most part, Wells Fargo paid local stage lines to carry its green strongboxes. However, in 1866, Wells Fargo began running overland stages, and it acquired ownership interests in numerous local stage lines. After the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, Wells Fargo increasingly transported shipments aboard trains. During the 1870s, as railroads expanded throughout the West, Wells Fargo express cars, usually coupled behind the tender and in front of the baggage car, became a common sight. Wells Fargo’s first messengers, during the California Gold Rush, carried letters by horseback to and from the mining camps; soon they began transporting treasure from the mines on riverboats to San Francisco.

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Beginning in the early 1860s, some coaches carried an iron box, known as a “pony safe” because of its small size, bolted to the floor under an inside passenger seat. With the rapid growth of railroads throughout the West, bandits turned their attention to train robbery. The first western train holdup took place on the newly finished transcontinental railroad near Verdi, Nevada, in 1870. Nonetheless, train holdups in the far west were quite rare at first. Nevada saw two in 1870, California one in 1881 and another in 1888, Utah one in 1883, and New Mexico two in 1883 and 1884. During the late 1880s, train holdups became increasingly common and violent, reaching epidemic proportions in the 1890s.

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Those were his last words.14 2 THE FIRST WELLS FARGO DETECTIVE Henry Johnson On a breezy spring day in 1868, the side-wheeler Montana, smoke billowing and steam hissing, churned through San Francisco Bay toward the huge Pacific Mail wharf at the foot of Brannan Street. Her deck was jammed with passengers, eager to see the booming city after the long Pacific voyage from the Isthmus of Panama. This was one year before the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and the trip to California was a long one by sea or by wagon train. A newspaperman watched a tumultuous scene as the Montana slowly pulled up alongside the dock for mooring. He found the wharf crowded with “the roughs, thieves, baggage-smashers, and jay-hawkers who infest San Francisco,” all attempting to charge through the gates and prey on the disembarking passengers.

pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

Successful self-regulation would guide Wall Street for the next sixty years as it eclipsed London and became the world’s leading financial center. THE CORRUPTION OF THE POSTWAR PERIOD was by no means limited to New York capitalists, government, or New York railroads. Indeed, the greatest railroad project in the nation’s history—the transcontinental railroad built between 1864 and 1869—also set off the greatest financial and political scandal of the nineteenth century. The transcontinental railroad had been envisioned ever since California had joined the Union in 1850, but the deepening political crisis between North and South had prevented any action. In 1862, with only loyal states now represented in Congress, the Pacific Railroad Act was passed creating the Union Pacific Railroad, the first corporation chartered by the federal government since the Second Bank of the United States in 1816.

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Then New York State decided to undertake a canal project that was not only the largest yet undertaken in the United States, but was more than twice as large as any canal yet built in the world, at a projected cost that rivaled the annual budget of the federal government. The Erie Canal would prove to be the first of the long, and continuing, list of megaprojects—the Atlantic cable, the transcontinental railroad, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, the Apollo project—that would become so much a part of the American experience. And it was a titanic roll of the economic dice. Failure might have crippled the New York economy for decades. But success would ensure that New York, already the most populous state by 1810, would outstrip all its rivals as the American economy developed.

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As many as ten thousand men—immigrant Irish, freed blacks, mustered-out soldiers, Chinese immigrants—worked on the two roads as they wended their ways across the plains, mountains, and deserts of the West toward a rendezvous at Promontory Point, Utah. The crews sometimes laid rails at the astonishing rate of four a minute. The casualty rate was appalling. Many were killed in accidents, but many too were killed in the drunken brawls that regularly erupted in the camps that moved along with the railhead. Even at the time, the transcontinental railroad was perceived as one of the great epics of that age of engineering miracles in which they lived. William Tecumseh Sherman called it the “work of giants.” The Western poet Joaquin Miller thought that “there is more poetry in the rush of a single railroad across the continent than in all the gory story of the burning of Troy.”

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Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America
by Sam Roberts
Published 22 Jan 2013

To which Vanderbilt famously testified, “My personal friends, when they take such grounds as they did, I am afraid of; I am not afraid of my enemies, but, my God, you must look out when you get among friends.” Vanderbilt’s ploy worked. The Central begrudgingly capitulated. Vanderbilt became its president. And, by 1869 (the year he turned 76 years old and when the last spike was driven to complete the first transcontinental railroad), his Central absorbed his Hudson line. “NOT ORNAMENTAL,” was how Henry Adams described the Commodore, a man who “lacked social charm.” A biography by a descendant, Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, recalled the Commodore’s predilection to spit streams of tobacco juice and fondle the maids at social events.

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“Our columns groan again with reports of wholesale slaughter by Railroad trains,” the Times fumed. As a result, railroads in New England adopted a single standard. The need for a national standard was hastened by the commercial development of the telegraph and, in 1862, when Congress authorized the building of the first transcontinental railroad. A year later, a rash of collisions spurred the Reverend Charles F. Dowd, coprincipal, with his wife, of Temple Grove Ladies’ Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York (a girls’ boarding school, which later became Skidmore College), to suggest multiple regional time zones. He sketched out his proposal in 1869 and the following year presented it to railway superintendents in New York.

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The C and T in the name of the 34-story New York Central Building at 230 Park Avenue, the railroad’s sublime and historic gem of a headquarters since 1929, were ignominiously chiseled into a G and an E when the building was sold to General Tire & Rubber (a ninth-floor office in 230 Park had been the scene of the mob execution of Mafia boss Salvatore Maranzano in 1931; appropriately enough, in The Godfather the meeting of the five Mafia families was filmed in the Central’s 32nd-floor boardroom, with its mural of Engine 999; it was also described as Dagny Taggart’s Transcontinental Railroad Building in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and later became the Helmsley Building). Since the Penn Central had gone belly up in 1970, operation of the terminal was turned over to Conrail (and, in 1983, to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Metro-North). In still another retrenchment, the railroad recommended the cancellation of all nine predawn passenger trains (only a decade before, there were 30), sending musicians, bartenders, printers, and other graveyard-shift workers scurrying to find alternative routes home.

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Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
Published 8 Oct 2018

The gamification of life in the city doesn’t mean everyone can afford to play. Through its history, San Francisco has stood as something like the nation’s western capital. But it has always been something of a funhouse mirror, reflecting a strange yet sublime potential self back to the rest of the nation. It bore witness to the Gold Rush, the Transcontinental Railroad, Japanese internment, the Beat poets, the free speech movement, the AIDS crisis and modern LGBTQ politics, and the birth of the semiconductor and motherboard. It was a city of refugees who turned camps into homes—not just the early settlers, but waves of Asian immigrants, families escaping the civil wars in Latin America.

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And the more I learned, the more I began to like it. San Francisco has a great story. It grew up at a very crucial time in this country—the end of slavery, end of the Civil War. The Gold Rush. The Big Four—Huntington, Stanford, Crocker, and Hopkins—tycoons who built the western end of the Transcontinental Railroad. On and on. You know how they got that name, Big Four? The government paid subsidies to any entrepreneur who could build a railroad. And the mileage on flat ground was quite different from mileage in the mountains, because you had to build trellises et cetera. They got, say, $16,000 or $17,000 per mile on flat ground, but $40,000 per mile through the mountains.

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And from the top of that tower, the other golden city—the city of the Beats, of Harvey Milk, of Cesar Chavez, the one forged in the friction of diversity and conflict, the one that gave us new definitions for human dignity—that city seems submerged. For now. Perhaps the right analogy for this time is not the Gold Rush but the Transcontinental Railroad. The train collapsed distance, made it possible for people to travel in days what once took months, and changed the country’s sense of time. It was disorienting. Suddenly, California was no longer a distant frontier, but a close-tied part of a new American story. And let us not forget the blood and exploitation and pain that pooled underneath those tracks, the people who laid the steel, who fed coal into the furnace of the engine, who repaired the cars and hauled freight and waited patiently on passengers.

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The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future
by Alec Ross
Published 13 Sep 2021

The Erie Canal linked: Tom Huntington, “America’s Top 10 Public Works Projects,” Invention & Technology, Winter 2009, https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/america%E2%80%99s-top-10-public-works-projects-2; “About This Place—History,” I&M Canal National Heritage Area, accessed June 29, 2020, https://iandmcanal.org/about-this-place-history/; “Transcontinental Railroad,” History.com, September 11, 2019, https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/transcontinental-railroad. The presentation was led by Aaron Maniam: “Aaron Maniam,” University of Oxford, Blavatnik School of Government, accessed June 3, 2020, https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/people/aaron-maniam; “Aaron Maniam (b. 1979),” Poetry.sg, accessed June 3, 2020, http://www.poetry.sg/aaron-maniam-bio.

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In the past, federal, state, and local governments transformed the national landscape with infrastructure projects. The Erie Canal linked the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes in 1825, the Illinois and Michigan Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River a generation later, and the First Transcontinental Railroad connected the eastern United States to the West Coast a generation after that. For the thirteen years that I commuted from Baltimore to Washington, DC, my train traveled through a 1.4-mile-long tunnel built in the 1890s by 2,400 workers. In the 20th century, the federal government helped build the Lincoln Tunnel, the interstate highway system, a national air traffic control system, and the internet.

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See also specific countries Export Administration Regulations Facebook FACT Coalition factory farming Fair Tax Mark fascism fashion industry fast fashion Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Federal Reserve Federal Trade Commission (FTC) FedEx Ferguson, Niall financial crisis of 2008–9 financial secrecy index Finland First Transcontinental Railroad Fisher Body Fletcher, Tom Foa, Roberto Stefan Ford Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Foreign Office (UK) foreign policy corporations and future of Pentagon and Foreign Service formulary apportionment Fortune 500 Fortune Global 500 list France Freelancers Union Freeman, Richard free trade, in Nordic countries free trade agreements Friedman, Milton Fukuyama, Francis G7 G20 Gascoigne, Clark Gates, Bill General Data Privacy Regulation generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) General Motors (GM) Georgetown University Germany Ghana GI Bill gig economy Gillard, Julia global economy, taxes and global intangible low-taxed income (GILTI) globalization.

pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Published 10 Sep 2012

He argued that American industry needed support, contending that “He, therefore, who is now against domestic manufacture, must be for reducing us either to dependence on that foreign nation, or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns.” Presidents James Madison, James Monroe, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams, holding similar views, supported subsidies and tariffs to promote domestic industry. In fact, American history is replete with examples, from the Erie Canal to the transcontinental railroad to the Apollo moon project to the Internet and the GPS, where the government has backed economic and industrial projects to build the nation’s transportation backbone or to create new technologies to enhance America’s competitiveness and then has handed them off to the private sector. In 1842, Congress awarded Samuel F.

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Step #1: Infrastructure Jobs to Compete Better Step #1 is to form a new public-private partnership to modernize America’s outdated transportation networks and create five million jobs—and maybe many more—with major investments over the next decade. Follow the model of President Lincoln, who used government aid to promote and subsidize the transcontinental railway, or President Theodore Roosevelt, who built the inland waterways, or President Dwight Eisenhower, who fathered America’s modern interstate highway network. Wall Street is reported to be eager to invest in infrastructure projects if the government puts up seed money. That plan wins backing from such traditional political adversaries as the U.S.

The First Tycoon
by T.J. Stiles
Published 14 Aug 2009

In 1872, this trio abandoned all caution as they forged ahead with stock market speculations and railroad acquisitions on their own behalf. In February, they launched a bull campaign in Union Pacific stock. On March 6, Clark assumed the railroad's presidency, and brought Banker and Schell onto the board. Aha! the press collectively exclaimed—the rise of Clark shows that the Commodore now has control of the transcontinental railroad, and will divert its traffic onto the Central.25 But no evidence points to Vanderbilt's involvement in the Union Pacific, as some contemporaries observed. “His friends assert that he is not engaged in the many plans set on foot by his ambitious son-in-law,” remarked the New York Herald on March 7.

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Appleton-Century Company, 1939), 209–10. For a thorough discussion of the Collins Line's steamships, see Cedric Ridgely-Nevitt, American Steamships on the Atlantic (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 147–71. 18 My discussion is informed by John Lauritz Larson's analysis of the early fights over the transcontinental railroad, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 243–55. 19 Circular, February 8, 1855; SA, February 10, 1855. 20 For a review of these events, see T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A.

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The liberal reformers will be discussed further later in the text. 93 Letter to the JoC, in NYT, March 6, 1868. 94 Mandelbaum, 58; Testimony Taken Before the Special Committee of the Assembly… in the Matter of the Erie Railway Investigation (1873), 764, Erie Railway Company Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School. For an important article on railroads and corruption, see Richard White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” JEH 90, no. 1 (June 2003): 19–43. White's discussion, while perceptive, treats the corruption of financial information as a new phenomenon of the Gilded Age, whereas it arose as early as corporations themselves; this book has shown examples as early as the 1830s. Nor is it generally true that “profit came less from selling goods and services than from financial maneuvering involving the securities of the firms;” CV's railroads paid 8 percent annual dividends on a stock capitalization that eventually amounted to roughly $100 million.

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The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
by Steven W. Thrasher
Published 1 Aug 2022

to maintain its coronavirus checkpoints: “South Dakota Tribe Sues Feds to Keep COVID-19 Checkpoints,” Associated Press, June 24, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/9b9fd6f0bd1d4d944ae3b35015d76f05. “accommodation in train cars”: Nadja Sayej, “‘Forgotten by Society’: How Chinese Migrants Built the Transcontinental Railroad,” Guardian, July 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jul/18/forgotten-by-society-how-chinese-migrants-built-the-transcontinental-railroad. people in the United States: Antonio De Loera-Brust, “As the US Exports Coronavirus, Trump Is Blaming Mexicans,” Foreign Policy, July 14, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/14/as-the-u-s-exports-coronavirus-trump-is-blaming-mexicans/.

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The justification for later quarantining these groups, curbing the migration of their families, or expelling them is often viruses. For instance, Chinese workers were welcomed to help with the California gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century and then, during the U.S. Civil War, to help build the Transcontinental Railroad. It was dangerous work and, as the Guardian put it, Chinese workers “were paid less than American workers and lived in tents, while white workers were given accommodation in train cars.” By the 1880s, the gold rush was long over, the railroads were built, and the Chinese workers were considered no longer useful by U.S. industry.

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superpredators “superspreaders” Swaziland Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) syphilis Syria syringes Syriza Party taxes taxonomy tear gas Tennessee testicular sonogram tetanus vaccine Texas Thailand Thatcher, Margaret Thirteenth Amendment Thomas, Kendall Thrasher, Bill Thrasher, Margaret Thrasher, Sharron Tibbets, Paul trailer parks Transcontinental Railroad Transgender Law Center transgender women transphobia Treatment Action Group (TAG) Truman, Harry Trump, Donald Truvada Tryon, Andrew tuberculosis (TB) Tuscaloosa City Council “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis” Twin Peaks (TV show) Twitter Types of Mankind (Nott and Gliddon) typhoid fever typhus Tyson Foods U (short film) Uber Eats UBS Ugly Laws, The (Schweik) undocumented unemployment unions United Kingdom (U.K.)

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The Great Air Race: Glory, Tragedy, and the Dawn of American Aviation
by John Lancaster
Published 15 Nov 2022

Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento in about ten days, shrank the continent still further. Technology sped that process. The Pony Express operated for just eighteen months, rendered almost instantly obsolete by the completion of the transcontinental telegraph in 1861. Even more important was the transcontinental railroad—“a big iron needle stitching the country together,” in the words of the writer Jessamyn West—which was completed on May 10, 1869, with the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit, Utah. Almost in a hammer stroke, people, letters, newspapers, and freight began crossing the country with unprecedented speed—as few as 100 hours from coast to coast.

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Among other things, he wrote, he needed to “locate a suitable field.” Sidney was one of twenty towns and cities that Billy Mitchell and his team had selected as mandatory refueling stops along the 2,700-mile route. Spaced at intervals that ranged in length from 56 to 180 miles, the control stops closely followed the transcontinental railroad built in the 1860s by the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads. This was no accident. Besides following the lowest terrain, the railroad would serve as both a navigation aid—an “iron compass”—and a conduit for fuel, spare parts, and other supplies that would be needed at the control stops.

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PART III Triumph 21 Donaldson and Hartney Battle Mountain in Nevada had long been welcoming travelers. In a wide basin between two mountain ranges, the town had been part of the nation’s transportation network for nearly a century—first as a way station for westbound wagon trains, then, since 1869, as a stop on the transcontinental railroad. Now it was a small but industrious community surrounded by copper mines, sheep ranches, and alfalfa farms irrigated by the Humboldt and Reese Rivers. There were several good hotels, one with an elegant restaurant whose French-born chef had worked in New York and San Francisco. A new power plant supplied electricity to homes and businesses seven nights and one full day a week.

pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
by Adam Winkler
Published 27 Feb 2018

LELAND STANFORD OF THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD HAD A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH JUSTICE STEPHEN FIELD. The railroads could plausibly claim to have improved society as much as any other corporations. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed when Stanford drove in the famous Golden Spike, engraved with Stanford’s name, at Promontory Summit. Not only did the transcontinental railroad enable people to cross the country with ease—something that could be appreciated by Field, whose first journey to California more than twenty years earlier had taken six weeks on a boat packed with cholera-infected passengers—but goods moved easily too.

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By 1920, this kind of corporation, with layers of hierarchical organization ruling over multiple divisions, had become the dominant type of business firm in major sectors of the American economy.13 Railroads, which had already experienced explosive growth before the Civil War, built more than 100,000 miles of additional tracks in the two decades following it. As before the war, graft remained popular with politicans and the railroads seeking to persuade them for rights of way, eminent domain power, and other privileges. When Congress was deciding whether to subsidize the building of the first transcontinental railroad in 1861, Leland Stanford sent one of his men to Washington with a suitcase full of Central Pacific stock certificates to dole out liberally to lawmakers. According to the best estimates, the Central Pacific Railroad alone distributed to lawmakers and lobbyists $500,000 annually—equal to roughly $13 million today.

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Bowman, The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought: Law, Power, and Ideology (1995), 54. 14. See Mark Wahlgren Summers, “To Make the Wheels Revolve We Must Have Grease: Barrel Politics in the Gilded Age,” 14 Journal of Policy History 49 (2002); Richard White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” 90 Journal of American History 19 (2003); Ted Nace, Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (2003), 93; Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America From 1870 to 1976 (1978), 7. 15. On the controversy over the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, see Joseph B.

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World
by Timothy Cresswell
Published 21 May 2006

The railroad also deprived localities of their own time. In 1870 a traveler from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco would have passed through over two hundred time zones. Every town had their own time, tied more or less to the position of the sun in the sky. This system worked until the building of the transcontinental railroad (1869); the increased speed of the railroad made this dangerous as it became possible for two trains to be in the same time and space with potentially fatal consequences. On November 18, 1883, the railroad enforced four uniform time zones in the United States. In 1884 this was expanded to the globe with the designation of Greenwich as the prime meridian and the division of the world into twenty-four time zones.

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Just ten years later, thirty million rail journeys were made. By 1870 the number had reached a staggering 336 million journeys. A similar story could be told in the United States. In 1850 the continental United States had 9,000 miles of track. By 1869 the figure had grown to 70,000. It was in 1869 that the transcontinental railroad was completed allowing relatively easy travel from coast to coast for goods and people. The railroad quickly became a symbol of national identity in the United States.50 Modernity is certainly a contested concept, and most commentators recognize that it has ambiguities and tensions within it.51 As Miles Ogborn writes, “Its periodisation, geographies, characteristics and promise all remain elusive.”52 Arguments about the nature of modernity revolve around notions of newness, artificiality, order, reason, democracy, technology, and chaos.

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The annihilation of time and space was a project that had overcome its principle hurdles. Muybridge’s sponsor, Leland Stanford, was also the president of the Central Pacific Railroad, and thus played his part in the transformation of senses of mobility. He was one of the four principle backers of the construction of the transcontinental railroad that was completed in 1869. Much of the money that paid for his horses, and for the labor of Muybridge, came from the development of the railroad and the transformation in the land that surrounded it. Jonathan Crary sees a logical connection between the development of the railroad system and the photography of Muybridge.9 He argues that Muybridge gave movement a “new form of legibility and rationality” through the development of innovative representational practices.10 Stanford, through his investment in the railroad, was a central figure in the reduction in time and money of mobility and the “time spent in motion from one place to another.”11 He was, in other words, deeply implicated RT52565_C003.indd 61 4/13/06 7:29:56 AM 62 • On the Move in transformations in the sense of mobility at the end of the nineteenth century—the process of the eradication of space by time.12 Along with the increased speed in life came new forms of perception—new understandings of the world in terms of speed and motion.

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The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway
by Doug Most
Published 4 Feb 2014

In his trip to the Great Plains, Edison saw farmers making long and costly trips just to get their produce and grains to the steam railroads. It occurred to him that if the farmers had a lighter, cheaper, narrower railroad, powered not by steam but by electricity, it could serve as a much more efficient link to the transcontinental railroad. Farmers could then spend more time harvesting their land and would be more productive. Edison returned to New Jersey and set to work, excited about the idea of applying electricity to transportation. He hired a crew to build a track one-third of a mile long and a mechanical engineer to work with him on an electric locomotive.

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Seven years later, in New York City, when Alfred Beach unveiled his one-block pneumatic subway tunnel, he did not let the moment pass quietly. Ever the showman, he invited dignitaries down and crowed to the world that he had solved the urban transportation nightmare. On May 10, 1869, when the last hammer swung to finish the transcontinental railroad, thousands gathered in the flatlands of Promontory, Utah, and stood in a circle or sat on the idling trains to watch as a gold spike was hammered into the ground. Within minutes, President Ulysses S. Grant received a telegram telling him the railroad was complete. In May 1883, when the Brooklyn Bridge opened, President Chester A.

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If the mission of the subway was for cities to feel a little bit smaller by quickening the way people could move from one neighborhood to the next, then Orville and Wilbur Wright had a similar goal. They were determined to make the whole world feel a little bit smaller. Their rickety 605-pound double-winged plane with a wingspan of forty feet and a twelve-horsepower engine was going to make the transcontinental railroad feel like a horse-drawn buggy and the steamship feel like a rowboat. The following year was shaping up to herald the future of travel. And the New York City subway was not even the most exciting transportation innovation. As the Wright brothers perfected their airplane to make it fly farther and faster, a hundred thousand people crowded into Madison Square Garden in January 1904 to see how much the automobile had advanced since the turn of the century.

The Hour of Fate
by Susan Berfield

Morgan’s days came to be consumed by the railroads: a sprawling, overextended, indebted industry that was growing with careless speed and changing everything it touched. It absorbed20 more money, mostly from European investors, than any enterprise before and more natural resources than any other in America. Some 170 million21 acres of the country’s public land would become the private property of the railroads, given, not sold, to them. Lincoln hoped transcontinental railroads would be a nation-building project after the Civil War. For every mile22 of track laid, the government awarded companies 12,800 acres, along with a bonus: any coal or iron underground. The J. P. Morgan Building, 23 Wall Street, circa 1905 Railroads relied on the labor of Chinese immigrants in the West and Irish, Italian, and Greek immigrants in the East.

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Anthracite was more efficient than charcoal; in many places it was more plentiful than wood. It burned hotter and cleaner than either. Anthracite made possible7 stronger grades of iron and steel, which made stronger rails, which allowed for heavier locomotives, which made interstate trade on the transcontinental railroads possible. Anthracite generated steam for those locomotives and for manufacturing glass, textiles, ceramics, and chemicals. In other words, anthracite powered the quest to expand westward. It also warmed the homes, offices, and schools of a distant America, urban and modern. All natural resources are political, and here too anthracite was of decisive consequence.

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He began at ten in the morning on that Wednesday and spoke until almost four in the afternoon, stopping only for a court-ordered two-hour lunch break. Griggs summed up23 the defense on Friday. Why are we here, he asked. This company didn’t deserve to be punished. The Sherman Act doesn’t forbid “the natural process of unification.” Beck argued that Northern Securities combined two competing transcontinental railroads and was a “virtual merger,” no matter what Morgan and Hill called it. He criticized New Jersey for its “reckless sale of corporate privileges to secure petty fees.” He told the courtroom that the method of creating a monopoly could be ingenious. It could be indirect. But it would still be illegal.

Western USA
by Lonely Planet

After winning independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico briefly ruled California, but then got trounced by the fledgling United States in the Mexican-American War (1846–48). The discovery of gold just over a week before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed sent the territory’s nonindigenous population soaring from 14,000 to 92,000 by 1850, when California became the 31st US state. Thousands of imported Chinese laborers helped complete the transcontinental railroad in 1869, which opened up markets and further spurred migration to the Golden State. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was barely a hiccup as California continued to grow exponentially in size, diversity and importance. Mexican immigrants arrived during the 1910–20 Mexican Revolution, and again during WWII, to fill labor shortages.

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Spain’s first civilian settlement here (1781), El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, remained an isolated farming outpost for decades. LA was incorporated as a California city in 1850, and by 1830 its population had swollen thanks to the collapse of the Northern California gold rush, the arrival of the transcontinental railroad, the citrus industry, the discovery of oil, the launch of the port of LA, the birth of the movie industry and the opening of the California Aqueduct. The city’s population has boomed from some 1.5 million in 1950 to almost four million today. LA’s growth has caused problems, including suburban sprawl and air pollution – though thanks to aggressive enforcement, smog levels have fallen annually since records have been kept.

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CHINATOWN Since 1848 this community has survived riots, earthquakes, bootlegging gangsters and politicians’ attempts to relocate it down the coast. Chinese Historical Society of America Museum MUSEUM (CHSA; Click here; 415-391-1188; www.chsa.org; 965 Clay St; adult/child $5/2, 1st Tue of month free; noon-5pm Tue-Fri, 11am-4pm Sat) Picture what it was like to be Chinese in America during the gold rush, transcontinental railroad construction or the Beat heyday at the nation’s largest Chinese American historical institute. Rotating exhibits are across the courtyard in CHSA’s graceful red-brick, green-tile-roofed landmark building, built as Chinatown’s YWCA in 1932 by Julia Morgan, chief architect of Hearst Castle.

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Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America
by Jamie Bronstein
Published 29 Oct 2016

Waves of immigration to the North, urbanization, and a complete revision of the labor system among freed people in the South precipitated a wide-ranging discussion of inequality and distribution. Large-scale industrialization, the formation of vertical and horizontal trusts, and the creation of transcontinental railroads facilitated the growth of large, untaxed, individual fortunes. But financial panics in 1873 and 1893, and the Great Strike of 1877, revealed the limitations of American upward mobility and the shortcomings of a philosophy predicated on individual bootstrapping. Some Americans, like sociologist William Graham Sumner, proposed that evolutionary theory meant that intervention in the economy to help the poorest would have tragic effects for the future of the race.

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The United States subsidized the growth of the railroads through vast land grants, totaling 131,230,358 acres. Selling the land parcels between the checkerboard parcels granted to the railroads for double the going price raised even more money that could be funneled back into the railroads. Historian Richard White argues that the transcontinental railroads in the United States suffered from duplication of effort and poor planning, because the root purpose of their funders and builders was not actually to transport goods but rather to enrich themselves through railroad funding. They were able to do this largely through a friendly network of newspaper reporters, politicians, and businessmen.

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He anticipated that being stakeholders in a larger enterprise would help workers to make cultural progress.61 And, centrally, he pointed out that there was more than one way to build complex industrialism in the late nineteenth century, and other countries were able to do it in ways that did not necessarily and permanently sacrifice the public to the corporations.62 By the end of the nineteenth century, some regulation was in place, transcontinental railroads capitulating because they thought they could control the regulation to their benefit.63 The Interstate Commerce Commission (1887) was intended to prevent railroads from engaging in the monopolistic practices from which they had benefited over the previous 15 years. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) targeted combinations in restraint of trade, although it was used more often to suppress unions than to dismantle corporate trusts (individuals involved in unions were seen as conspiring together, whereas the individuals who made up the fictive personhood of the corporation were viewed by the courts as comprising a single person).64 The changes of the late nineteenth century gave rise to economic protest literature that called into question American exceptionalism.65 In 1896, Charles Barzilai Spahr, who held a Ph.D. from Columbia University and edited a magazine called The Outlook, wrote An Essay on the Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States, systematically evaluating economic inequality in the United States.

pages: 608 words: 184,703

Moon Oregon Trail Road Trip: Historic Sites, Small Towns, and Scenic Landscapes Along the Legendary Westward Route
by Katrina Emery and Moon Travel Guides
Published 27 Jul 2020

By this point in their journey, emigrants were familiar with hardship, and many had already lost loved ones to disease, accidents, or drownings. While the delicate tallgrass prairie was a beautiful place to travel through, pioneers rushed along to reach the Rocky Mountains and Oregon before the end of summer. By 1869 the transcontinental railroad was complete—effectively ending the necessity of the trail; the Union Pacific portion stretches across the entire state and is still an integral part of the landscape and economy. Today’s travelers can follow the old trail in style: Detour to Lincoln and you’ll find a multicultural and lively college town, while the western cities of Kearney and North Platte promise some of the country’s best steaks and a sprinkling of craft breweries.

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Side Trip: Cheyenne Cheyenne started when the railroad arrived in Wyoming. In 1867 it was where the tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad stopped—for six months, until the crew moved on. The tracks would connect with the Central Pacific in 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah, creating the first transcontinental railroad. Cheyenne boomed during this time and established itself as a lasting city; since most other end-of-the-tracks towns died away, Cheyenne became known as the “Magic City of the Plains.” It attracted a growing population with the wild character of the West, but also businesses, industry, the U.S.

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Cheyenne Depot Museum The main event inside the former Union Pacific Depot is the Cheyenne Depot Museum (121 W. 15th St., Suite 300, 307/632-3905, www.cheyennedepotmuseum.org, 9am-6:30pm Mon.-Fri., 9am-5pm Sat., and 11am-3pm Sun. June-Aug., 9am-5pm Mon.-Fri., 9am-3pm Sat., and 11am-3pm Sun. Sept.-Apr., $8 adults, $7 seniors and military, free under age 13). It offers a deep look into the history of Cheyenne, which is tied to the transcontinental railroad. Exhibits recall how folks used to travel west (wagons, clipper ships, the many westbound trails) before the arrival of the railroad. The small space packs in a lot; upstairs is an amazing model train that chugs along through landscapes of the West. The model is of the Union Central and Northern lines—nearby, the real train plies its route outside the depot, viewable from an indoor platform.

pages: 183 words: 51,514

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration
by Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David
Published 1 Apr 2013

A sequential buildup of a Full Cycling Network would be a counterpart to the ever increasing escalation of actions at the moon and Mars. Earth, the moon, and Mars become busy places as people, cargo, and commerce navigate through the inner solar system. Think of it as a space version of the early transcontinental railroads here on Earth. They were the transportation backbone that moved people and cargo into vast stretches of wilderness, enabling exploration and eventual settlement of regions. Space road map: Aldrin cycling system (Illustration Credit 2.2) In the present day, you don’t have to look too far to see a number of terrestrial parallels to cycling transportation.

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Water is by far the easiest and most useful substance that can be extracted from the moon and utilized to establish a cislunar spacefaring transportation infrastructure. Establishing a permanent foothold on the moon opens the space frontier to many parties for many different purposes, Spudis contends. By creating a reusable, extensible cislunar spacefaring system, a “transcontinental railroad” in space can be built, connecting two worlds, Earth and the moon, as well as enabling access to points in between. Spudis and I share a similar perspective. A future lunar outpost can be internationalized, a common-use facility for science, exploration, research, and commercial activity.

pages: 198 words: 53,264

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments
by Michael Batnick
Published 21 May 2018

He became so fed up with these money‐losing ventures that he wrote to a fellow author, “If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me nine editions.” He also lost plenty of money the old‐fashioned way, by buying stocks and selling at the wrong time. One of many examples was the Oregon Transcontinental Railroad, which he purchased at $78 a share and sold at $12. Of this experience, he said, “I don't wish to ever look at a stock report again.”6 These experiences led him to not only errors of commission but errors of omission, which perhaps burned an even deeper hole of resentment into his soul.

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Ackman targeting, 90 credit default swaps, 133 McDonald's, Ackman targeting, 89–90 Mensa, 37–38 Meriwether, John, 35, 38 Merrill Lynch, 40 Merton, Robert, 39 Nobel Prize in Economics, 40–41 Microsoft, shareholder wealth, 109 Mohawk Data, trading level, 70 Money Game, The, (Smith), 68 Morgan Growth Fund, decline, 50 Morgan, Walter, 47–48 Morse, Charles, 19 Mortgage bonds, insuring, 133 Mullins, David, 39 Munger, Charles, 37, 78, 119, 137, 139 investment, 140 returns, 141 wealth, compounding, 143 Mungerisms, 3, 140 Mutual funds, superiority, 47–48 NASDAQ 100 index, increase, 57, 143 NASDAQ Composite, gains, 112 NASDAQ peak, 105 National Indemnity, Buffett purchase, 78 National Mutual, losses, 125 National Student Marketing, shares purchase, 70 Nebraska Furniture Mart, store opening, 78 Neill, Humphrey B., 67 Netflix, 139–140 Net working capital, 5 term, usage, 4 New Century Financial, 134 Newton, Isaac, 37 New York Institute of Finance, 4 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 4 listed stock trading, 135 opening, 147 shares, trading level (1934), 6–7 New York Vaporizing Co. (Twain investment), 28 No Bull (Steinhardt), 58, 60 Nocera, Joe, 90 Not safe for work (NSFW), Snapchat categorization, 151 Nudge (Thaler), 126 One‐decision stocks, 50 Options, usage, 131 Oreos, comparison, 91 Oregon Transcontinental Railroad, Twain share purchase, 29 O'Reilly Automotive, Sequoia holding, 111 Overconfidence, impact, 61, 75–76, 82 Overtrading, 159 Paige Compositor Manufacturing Company, 31 Paige, James, 30 Paine Webber, Livermore exit, 16 Palmolive, comparison, 91 Paulson & Co., founding, 132 Paulson, John, 3, 129, 131–132 merger/arbitrage, 133 Pearson, Mike, 113 Buffett, contrast, 114 Pellegrini, Paolo, 132–133 Penn Dixie Cement, shares (purchase), 58 Pershing Square Capital Management, 89 Pittsburgh National Bank, 101 Plasmon (Twain investment), 28 Polaroid, trading level, 70 Poppe, David, 114 Portfolio turnover, 69 Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain (PIIGS), 158 Post‐go‐go years meltdown, 147 Post III, William, 131 Price, Teddy, 19–20 Princeton University, 47–48 Private/public investing, history, 149 Profit sharing, 68 Prospect Theory (Kahneman/Tversky), 126 Pyramid schemes, 93 Qualcomm, gains, 57 Quantitative easing program, 134–135 Quantum Fund, 100, 103 Ramirez, Alberto/Rosa, 132 Rational thinking, suspension, 27 Recession, odds (calculation), 38 Renaissance Technologies, 135 Return on equity, term (usage), 4 Reverse crash, 100 Risk, arrival, 32 Risk management, 23 Roaring Twenties, bull market cycle, 7 Robertson, Julian, 58 Roche, Cullen, 99 Rockefeller, John, 30 Rogers, Henry (“Hell Hound”), 30–32 Rooney, Frank, 80, 81 Rosenfeld, Eric, 39, 41 Ruane, Bill, 4, 109, 112 Ruane & Cunniff, 112 Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb, 110–111 Russell 3000, 135 Russia, Quantum Fund loss, 103–104 Sacca, Chris, 145, 149–150 Salomon Brothers, 39 Buffett investment, 79 Samuelson, Paul (remarks), 51 San Francisco Call, 31 Schloss, Walter, 4 Schmidt, Eric, 150 Scholes, Myron, 39 Nobel Prize in Economics, 40–41 Schroeder, Alice, 80 Schwager, Jack, 159 Sears, Ackman targeting, 90 Sears Holdings, 109 Securities and Exchange Act, 7 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 13D registration, 90 creation, 22 Security Analysis (Graham), 3–5 See's Candy Berkshire Hathaway purchase, 78 purchase, 142 Self‐esteem, satisfaction (impact), 75–76 Sequoia Fund, 107 operation, 110–111 Shiller, Robert, 75–76, 87 Short squeeze, 93 Silvan, Jon, 94 Simmons, Bill, 151 Simons, Jim, 135 Slack, Sacca investment, 149 Smith, Adam, 68, 121 Snapchat, 151 Snap, going public, 151 Snowball, The, (Schroeder), 80 Social activities, engagement, 87–88 Soros Fund Management, losses, 105 Soros, George, 58, 60, 100, 103 interaction, 102 reform, 121 South Sea Company shares, 37 Speculation, 15 avoidance, 28 SPY, 62 Stagecoach Corporate Stock Fund, 52 Stamp revenues, trading, 141–142 Standard Oil, 30 Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P500) ETF, 62 gains, 112, 114 performance, comparison, 119 shorting, 163 Valeant performance, comparison, 113 Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz & Company, opening, 58 Steinhardt, Michael, 55, 58 performance record, 59–60 Steinhardt Overseas Fund, 60 Stoker, Bram, 30 Stock market, choices, 114–115 Stocks crashing/reverse crashing, 100 return, 99 stock‐picking ability, 88 Stock trader, training, 18 Strategic Aggressive Investing Fund, 102 Sunk cost, 110 Sun Valley Conference, 57 “Superinvestors of Graham‐and‐Doddsville, The,” 111–112 Taleb, Nassim, 42 Target, Ackman targeting, 90 TDP&L, 50 Tech bubble, inflation, 57 Technivest, 50 Thaler, Richard H., 75, 126 Thinking, Fast and Slow, (Kahneman), 15 Thorndike, Dorain, Paine & Lewis, Inc., 48 Time horizons, 120 Time Warner, AOL merger, 49 Tim Ferriss Show, The, (podcast), 150 Tim Hortons, spinoff, 89 Tract on Monetary Reform, A, (Keynes), 125–126 Trader (Jones), 119 Trustees Equity Fund, decline, 50 Tsai, Jerry, 65, 68 stocks, trading, 69 ten good games, 71 Tsai Management Research, sale, 70 Tversky, Amos, 81 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 25, 27, 75 bankruptcy filings, 32 money, losses, 27–32 public opinion, hypersensitivity, 31 Twilio, Sacca investment, 149 Twitter, Sacca investment, 149–150 Uber, Sacca investment, 149 Undervalued issues, selection, 10 Union Pacific, shares (sale), 18 United Copper, cornering, 19 United States housing bubble, 132 University Computing, trading level, 70 US bonds international bonds, spreads, 41 value, decline, 61 U.S. housing bubble, impact, 132 U.S.

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Top 10 San Diego
by Pamela Barrus and Dk Publishing
Published 2 Jan 2007

Alonzo Horton Establishes a New City (1867) Horton realized an investment opportunity to develop a city closer to the water than Old Town. He bought 960 acres for $265, then sold and gave lots to anyone who could build a brick house. Property values soared, especially after a fire in 1872 in Old Town. “New Town” became today’s San Diego. Transcontinental Railroad Arrives (1885) Interest was renewed in San Diego when the Transcontinental Railroad finally reached town. Real estate speculators poured in, infrastructure was built, and Previous pages: La Jolla coastline Panama-California Exposition (1915–16) To celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal and draw economic attention to the first US port of call on the West Coast, Balboa Park (see pp14–15) was transformed into a brilliant attraction.

pages: 366 words: 109,117

Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City
by Neal Bascomb
Published 2 Jan 2003

Contents Title Page Dedication PROLOGUE The Soaring Twenties Part One CHAPTER 1 A Hunch, Then a Demand CHAPTER 2 The Architect-Artist CHAPTER 3 A Proud and Soaring Thing CHAPTER 4 The Organization Man CHAPTER 5 Make the Land Pay CHAPTER 6 An American Invention CHAPTER 7 The Poet in Overalls CHAPTER 8 To Scrape the Sky CHAPTER 9 Equivalent to War CHAPTER 10 A Three-way Race INTERLUDE Oxygen to the Fire Part Two CHAPTER 11 Call It a “Vertex” CHAPTER 12 A Monument to the Future CHAPTER 13 The Prize of the Race CHAPTER 14 The Butterfly and Its Cocoon CHAPTER 15 Crash CHAPTER 16 Pharaoh Against Pharaoh CHAPTER 17 Aladdin’s Genii and Paper Fights CHAPTER 18 The Chase into the Sky CHAPTER 19 Excelsior EPILOGUE Spirit—Not Steel and Stone Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Copyright Page Photo Insert For My Parents P R O L O G U E The Soaring Twenties “What floor, please?” said the elevator man. “Any floor,” said Mr. In. “Top floor,” said Mr. Out. “This is the top floor,” said the elevator man. “Have another floor put on,” said Mr. Out. “Higher,” said Mr. In. “Heaven,” said Mr. Out. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “May Day” Like other races—to build the transcontinental railroad, discover the North Pole, scale Everest, or land on the moon—the race to build the tallest skyscraper in the world demanded sheer determination, deep pockets, terrific speed, unbridled ambition, grand publicity campaigns, and a dose of hubris. It began in 1924 with architects William Van Alen and Craig Severance, who had just passed into their partnership’s tenth year.

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It was a business to be mastered. An architect who understood finance and industry, one who recognized the importance of maximizing profit, would go far. Every year since the end of the Civil War, the pump was being primed to enable this kind of architect—one Severance was training to become—to succeed. The transcontinental railroad brought the economic might of America into one fold, thereby giving rise to great fortunes and corporate giants. Increasingly industrial juggernauts ruled business, and cities like New York and Chicago held sway over the countryside. In 1907 when Severance went out on his own, he had an intuitive understanding of this modern world and its potential.

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Bibliography SELECTED BOOKS Abramson, Daniel, Skyscraper Rivals: The AIG Building and the Architecture of Wall Street (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001) Adams, James Truslow, The Epic of America (Little, Brown, & Company, 1931) Allen, Frederick Lewis, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (Harper & Row, 1931) Allen, Frederick Lewis, Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-Thirties in America (Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1940) Ambrose, Stephen, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–69 (Simon & Schuster, 2000) Andersen, Stanley Peter, American Ikon: Response to the Skyscraper, 1875–1934 (University of Michigan, Ph.D. dissertation, 1960) Bacon, Mardges, Ernest Flagg: Beaux-Arts Architect and Urban Reformer (MIT Press, 1968) Baker, Paul R., Richard Morris Hunt (MIT Press, 1980) ———, Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White (Free Press, 1989) Bank of the Manhattan Company, Manna-hatin: The Story of New York (Ira J.

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How the Post Office Created America: A History
by Winifred Gallagher
Published 7 Jan 2016

In short, mail service didn’t remotely meet the booming state’s urgent economic, political, and social needs, and in 1856, seventy-five thousand fed-up residents signed a petition of protest to the federal government. Private carriers known as “expressmen,” who began to haul freight, people, and mail across the West before the transcontinental railroad’s completion, quickly stepped in to fill the communications and transportation void. In 1849, Alexander Todd, a bookkeeper turned failed miner, sensed an opportunity and began to carry letters by horse and boat between San Francisco and the prospectors’ camps for an ounce of gold dust per delivery—an impressive measure of mail’s value.

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In 1900, Carney became the first African American to earn a Congressional Medal of Honor, and he and his regiment were celebrated a century later in the movie Glory. 11 FULL STEAM AHEAD THE POST IMPROVED IN major ways during the Civil War, but its Railway Mail Service was an innovation of a different order, which changed Americans’ concepts of distance and time, national and local, modern and old-fashioned. The completion of the five transcontinental railroads, starting with the Union Pacific and Central Pacific in Promontory, Utah, in 1869 and ending with the Great Northern in Seattle in 1893, was one of nineteenth-century America’s signature achievements. The advance opened both its own West to development and the Far East to commerce. At the same time, the vast rail networks allowed most of the nation’s intercity mail to be sorted as well as transported aboard moving trains—a tremendous boost to the country’s booming industrial economy and its population of passionate correspondents alike.

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If their plain predecessors were about efficiency, the colorful new postcards were about the pleasures of preserving a memory and sharing it with others. Iconic scenes of Old Faithful and Niagara Falls celebrated the wonders of long-distance travel, which, though not easy, was easier than it had been before the transcontinental railroad. Humbler cards documented small-town Americans’ pride in their new hotels, fairgrounds, and paved, electric-lit main streets. Still others, such as drawings of Victorian ladies careering about in hot-air balloons, were meant to amuse, as were those that stooped to crude ethnic caricature.

pages: 461 words: 109,656

On Grand Strategy
by John Lewis Gaddis
Published 3 Apr 2018

Douglas, the senior senator from Illinois, was a fellow Springfield lawyer and frequent Lincoln debating partner who, although a Democrat, shared the Whigs’ enthusiasm for economic development. Both sought to position their region between eastern innovation and western opportunity. Both favored, as the first step, an Illinois-based transcontinental railroad. Both knew it would need federal subsidies, land grants, and military protection. Both expected southerners, wanting their own route, to demand compensation. But only “Judge Douglas,” as Lincoln called him, thought he knew what it should be. Why not in the vast Kansas-Nebraska territory—extending west to the Rocky Mountains and north to the Canadian border—repeal all congressional restrictions on slavery and let settlers themselves decide its future?

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Adams compared with, 250–51 mastery of scale, space, and time by, 250–53 and need to retain border states’ allegiance, 238 political career of, 223–24 preservation of Union as utmost goal of, 235–36, 239, 240, 241 second inaugural address of, 252 self-education of, 22, 223, 228 on slavery, 226–27, 228–29, 238–39 transcontinental railroad and, 225, 259 war powers invoked by, 242, 247 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 222 Lincoln (film), 16–17 Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858), 231–32 Livia (Augustus’ wife), 87 Lloyd George, David, 271, 286 Locke, John, 110, 157, 160 Louis XIV, king of France, 157, 192–93 Louis XVI, king of France, 166, 197 Louis XVIII, king of France, 194 Louisiana Purchase, 177 Luce, Henry, 298 Lusitania, RMS, 269 Luther, Martin, 135 MacArthur, Douglas, 54 Macbeth (char.), 217, 223 McClellan, George B., 240, 242, 251 in 1864 election, 247–48 McCormick, Robert, 301 Macedonia, 10 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 23, 24–25, 105, 116, 150, 166, 170, 173, 175, 192, 201, 236, 309 on alignment of means with ends, 113–14 Augustine contrasted with, 109, 111–12, 114 on balance of power, 115–16 Berlin on, 117–19 as fox, 107 on free will, 106–8 on God, 106–7 imprisonment of, 106, 109–10 on justice, 112 on just war, 111–12 on leadership, 112–14 on love vs. fear, 139–40 as pivot in the history of ideas, 121 on princes as both lions and foxes, 135 on republican governments, 115–16 on responding to changed circumstances, 135 on Roman Catholic Church, 114–15 on sketching, 113, 201, 304 on usefulness of history, 108 utilitarian morality of, 114 on violence as means to an end, 111 Mackinder, Halford, 258–60, 261, 264, 265, 281 McPherson, James, 240 Madison, James, 169, 218, 221 Federalist essays of, 172–74, 176, 179, 182, 251 on reconciling opposing ideas, 173–74 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 259, 280 Manchuria, Japan’s conquest of, 280 Manicheanism, 97–98 Marathon, battle of, 2, 31, 36 Marx, Karl, 245, 248, 276, 306 Marxists, Marxism, 305, 306 Mary I, queen of England, 124, 126–28, 133, 146 Mary II, queen of England, 157 Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland, 127, 136–37 execution of, 141–42 and plots to depose Elizabeth, 138–39, 140–41 Mason, James, 246 Mattingly, Garrett, 129 Maximilian, emperor of Mexico, 246 means, alignment of ends with, 12–13, 27, 101, 105, 113–14, 132, 133, 145–46, 171–72, 183, 198, 203, 204, 215, 271, 287–88 balancing in, 77, 82, 240 Elizabeth I and, 133 FDR and, 283, 287–88 foxes and, 310–11 grand strategy as, 21–22, 203, 312 hedgehogs and, 12–13, 310 Lincoln and, 240 Machiavelli on, 113–14 Napoleon’s failure at, 204, 215 overstretch and, 215 Philip II’s failure at, 131–32, 143, 145–46 proportionality in, 101, 105, 112, 114, 118–19, 145–46, 175, 198, 215–16, 312 across time, 14–15, 16–17 Wilson’s failure at, 271 Xerxes’ failure at, 204, 215 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 23, 110 Medina Sidonia, Duke of, 143, 144 Megara, 45–46, 54, 55–56, 59 Melos, Melians, 52–53, 104 Metternich, Klemens von, 115 Mexican-American War (1846–48), 221, 311 Mexico, 152, 246–47, 269, 270 Mission to Moscow (Davies), 286–87 Missouri Compromise (1820), 179, 220, 225, 226 monotheism, 94–95 Monroe, James, 178, 218, 222 Monroe Doctrine, 152, 178–79, 180, 219, 246, 257, 266 morality, politics and, 117, 223, 232 Moscow, Napoleon’s capture of, 11, 18, 189, 198 Moscow Conference (1943), 300 Mutina, battle of, 71 Mytilene, in revolt from Athens, 51–52 Napoleon I, emperor of France, 11, 90, 178, 193–94, 217, 237, 240, 309 as failing to align means with ends, 204, 215 as hedgehog, 215 Moscow captured by, 11, 18, 189, 198 Russia invaded by, 185–86, 188–89, 197–200, 203–4 Tolstoy’s portrayal of, 188, 205–6 Napoleon III, emperor of France, 246 Napoleonic Wars, 197, 266, 273 narratives (dramatization), history and, 16, 18–19, 62 Naval War College, U.S., author’s strategy seminars at, 60–61, 65 navigation, leadership as, 47–49, 84, 86 Navy, U.S., FDR’s upgrading of, 281 Neoplatonism, 100 net assessment, 214–15 see also coup d’oeil; sketching Netherlands, Spanish rule in, 125, 129–31, 134, 136, 137, 142 New Deal, 279–80 New Salem, Ill., 223 Nicholas II, tsar of Russia, 286 Nicias, 57, 65, 102 Nicolay, John, 233 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 296 Niemen River, 195, 197, 198, 203 North America: British colonies in, see American colonies (British) French colonies in, 155, 156, 159, 166 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), French withdrawal from, 59 North Korea, 55 North Vietnam, 59 obstacles, 17, 20, 48, 49, 65, 77, 214, 230, 277 Octavia (Augustus’ sister), 77, 80 Octavian, see Augustus, emperor of Rome Odysseus, 7 Odyssey (Homer), 85 Okinawa, 54 Olney, Richard, 256–57 On War (Clausewitz), 23–24, 55, 186–87, 189–90, 205, 210, 215–16, 237, 252, 273 opposing ideas: balancing of, 40, 51, 113, 158, 173, 177–78, 215, 251, 265, 311 coexistence of, 26, 33, 312 opposing ideas, reconciling of: Clausewitz on, 196 FDR as master of, 291, 307 Machiavelli on, 113 through scale, 17–19, 38, 66, 173–74 in single mind, 14, 15–17, 38, 66, 91, 107, 170, 213, 291, 307 in space, 14, 15–17, 38, 66, 173–74 Sun Tzu on, 83 across time, 14–15, 38, 66, 173–74, 309 order: Augustine on, as necessary for justice, 101, 105, 114, 116 justice vs., 100 Ordinance of 1787, 229 “Originality of Machiavelli, The” (Berlin), 117 Orlando (Woolf), 122 Ottoman empire, Greek rebellion in, 182 overstretch, 215 Oxford University, 295, 296 Paine, Thomas, 161–63, 164, 165 Panama Canal, 257, 266, 280–81 Paris, Peace of (1763), 159 Paris, Treaty of (1783), 167 Parker, Geoffrey, 145–46, 152 Parliament, English, 140–41, 146, 156, 158, 160 Parma, Duke of, 140, 143, 144 Parthians, 70, 74, 76, 80, 84 Patton, George S., 195, 196 Pavane (Roberts), 149–50 Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on, 287, 288, 297 Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.E.), 32, 34 Athenian invasion of Sicily in, 57–58 Athenian plague in, 50–51 Megara in, 45–46, 54, 55–56, 59 Mytilenian revolt in, 51–52 Pericles’ role in, 36, 38, 46–50, 53–54, 55 slaughter of Melians in, 52–53 Spartan invasion of Attica in, 49 Spartans’ fear of growing Athenian power as cause of, 41, 43, 48 Thucydides on causes of, 40–41, 48 Vietnam War compared to, 60–61 Peraino, Kevin, 245 Pericles, 35–36, 261, 309 and conflict between equality and empire, 44–45, 52 death of, 51 funeral oration of, 38–40, 45, 49, 161, 273 growing rigidity of, 47–49, 50, 53 loss of credibility feared by, 46, 53–56, 59–60 Megarian decree of, 46, 54, 55–56, 57, 59–60 Peloponnesian War and, 36, 38, 46–50, 53–54, 55 reconstructed Athenian culture as goal of, 36, 37–40, 44 Spartans’ offers of compromise rejected by, 46–47, 53 Perpetual Peace (Kant), 115–16 Persian empire, 30, 45 Persians, The (Aeschylus), 11–12, 35 Persian Wars, 32, 36, 42 see also Xerxes, king of Persia Peru, Spanish conquest of, 152 Perusia, siege of, 75, 76 Pfuel, Karl Ludwig von, 209 Philip II, king of Spain, 123, 139, 151, 152, 309 as Augustinian, 123, 126, 132, 135, 137, 145, 150 constraints on, 130–31 Elizabeth’s rejection of marriage to, 128 extensive empire of, 125 grand strategy of, 132 invasion of England planned by, 137–38, 142–43 marriage of Mary I and, 126 Netherlands and, 129–31, 134, 136, 142 restoration of English Catholicism as goal of, 137–39 service to God as primary goal of, 123–24, 128, 129, 131, 137, 145, 146 statecraft of, 123–24, 136 as unable to align ends with means, 131–32, 143, 145–46 as unwilling to delegate authority, 126, 130, 143 Philippi, battle of, 73–74 Philippics (Cicero), 69, 73 Philippines, 54, 257, 266 Piraeus, see Athens-Piraeus walls Pius V, Pope, 137, 138, 139 pivots: in the history of ideas, 121, 199 princes as, 121, 129, 133, 134–35, 147 plague, in Athens, 50–51 planning: improvisation vs., 24–25, 26 surprises and, 201 see also strategy Plataea, battle of, 11, 36 Plato, 196 pluralism, Berlin’s concept of, 311 Plutarch, 32, 44, 47, 48, 67, 77 Poland, USSR and, 299, 300 policy, war as instrument of, 197–98, 215, 273, 312 politics, morality and, 117, 223, 232 Polk, James K., 221, 224 Polonius (char.), 6, 91 Pompeius, Sextus, 72, 73, 74, 76–79 Porter, Patrick, 288 Portsmouth, Treaty of (1905), 266 Portugal, Spanish rule in, 131, 140, 142 Potidaea, 41 power, balance of, 140, 147, 177, 180, 181, 258, 261, 264, 265, 275, 280 Machiavelli on, 115–16 Treaty of Westphalia and, 115 practices: gap between theories and, 185–89, 195–96, 201–2, 208, 209, 213, 216, 271 principles tethered to, 63–66, 105, 113 “Prague Spring,” 59 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 23, 106, 109–11, 116, 117, 124, 170 principles, practices tethered to, 63–66, 105, 113 probabilities, strategy and, 214–15 proportionality, 101, 105, 112, 114, 118–19, 145–46, 160–61, 166, 175, 198, 215–16, 312 Protestants, Protestantism, 110, 118, 130, 133, 135, 136, 1146 Pythius, 13 Quebec, 159 radio, as instrument of democracy, 292 Raleigh, Walter, 145, 153 Reagan, Ronald, 309 religion: irreconcilability of, 119 monotheistic, 94–95 polytheistic, 94 statecraft and, 135–36 states and, 94–96, 98–105 Remirro de Orco, 110–11 Republicans, Republican Party, 230, 232 republics: equality and, 162, 173 Machiavelli on balance of power in, 115–16 retreats, consequences of, 55 Richard II (Shakespeare), 217 Richelieu, Cardinal, 115 Ridolfi, Roberto, 139 Roberts, Andrew, 255 Roberts, Keith, 149–50 Roman Catholic Church, 90, 106, 114–15 Roman empire: fall of (476), 89 legacy of, 90–91 Rome: food riots in, 78 sack of (410), 97 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 295, 298, 309 Berlin on, 289–91, 306–7 coup d’oeil of, 289–90, 307 geopolitical savvy of, 280–82, 283 German-Soviet pact as viewed by, 284 improvising by, 282 Lend-Lease and, 286 navy upgraded by, 281 need for public support understood by, 282 need to align ends and means understood by, 283, 287–88 New Deal of, 279–80 in 1932 election, 279 in planning for U.S. entry into war, 284 radio addresses of, 291–93 rearmament program of, 284–85, 288 reconciling opposing ideas mastered by, 291, 307 as successful grand strategist, 288 as unafraid of the future, 289, 306–7 USSR and, 288, 299–300 Roosevelt, Theodore, 266, 280 Rumsfeld, Donald, 24 Russia, 259 Napoleon’s invasion of, 185–86, 188–89, 197–200, 203–4 see also Soviet Union Russian Revolution, 3, 269, 271–72, 276 Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), 266 Rutledge, Ann, 222 St.

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.: Amistad case and, 220–21 Dred Scott decision of, 230 surprises, planning and, 201 swamps, see obstacles Syracuse, 56, 57–58 Taiping Rebellion, 273 Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens), 112 Tarutino, battle of (1812), 199, 204 temperament, 308, 309 Tent-Life in Siberia (Kennan), 93 Tetlock, Philip E., 8–10, 12, 15, 20, 309 Teutoburg, ambush of Roman army at, 88 Thagaste, 96 Themistocles, 11, 46, 49, 215 Athenians’ ostracism of, 35 Athens-Piraeus walls built by, 31, 33–34 theorists, gaps between historians and, 23 theory: gap between practice and, 24–25, 104, 185–89, 195–96, 201–2, 208, 209, 213, 216, 271 laws vs., 191–92, 210–11 overreliance on, 209 as training, 208, 210, 216 Thermopylae, battle of, 10–11, 13, 31, 42–43, 204 Thessaly, 10 thinking: fast vs. slow, 20 see also foxes; hedgehogs Thirty Years’ War, 156, 273 Thrace, 10 Thucydides, 38, 47, 50, 52, 53, 58, 102, 149, 260 on causes of Peloponnesian War, 40–41, 48 on human nature, 51 opposing ideas accommodated by, 33 on usefulness of history, 32–33, 62 Vietnam War and, 60–61 Tiberius, emperor of Rome, 87, 88 time, 21, 251–52 alignment of ends and means across, 14–15, 16–17 expansion of war through, 186, 198 interdependence of space, scale, and, 252–53 reconciling opposites across, 14–15, 38, 66, 173–74 Tolstoy, Leo, 4–5, 33, 61–62, 190, 304 European history as viewed by, 192–93 on free will vs. determinism, 211–13, 252–53 on gap between theory and practices of war, 185–86, 187–89, 209 on interdependence of time, space, and scale, 252–53 irony and, 194 Napoleon contrasted with Kutuzov by, 205–7 and reconciling opposing ideas through scale, 17–18 Tombs, Robert, 157–58 Tooze, Adam, 278 training: Clausewitz on, 24, 25 in competitive athletics, 26 theory as, 208, 210, 216 Trotsky, Leon, 272 Troy, 25 Truman, Harry, Korean War and, 54, 55–56 Turner, Stansfield, 61 U-boats, 268–69, 270 Union (U.S.), 175, 229 and alignment of ends and means, 183 compromise and, 224 Emancipation and, 177 Federalist and, 172, 173 preservation of, as Lincoln’s utmost goal, 235–36, 239, 240, 241 South’s secession from, 234–35 United States: antiwar protests in, 59 Berlin’s World War II reports on, 297–302 in diplomatic recognition of Soviet Union, 280 economic might of, 265–66, 277–78, 288 great power system and, 266–67 hegemony over North and South America proclaimed by, 152, 178–79, 180 isolationism in, 278, 279–80, 281 Lend-Lease and, 286 race riots in, 59 Soviet exports of, 277 transcontinental railroad in, 225, 259 World War I and, 266–67, 281–82 World War II and, 267–68, 287–89, 291–93 unknowns, strategy and, 214–15 Vandals, 97 Varus, Publius Quinctilius, 88 Venezuela crisis (1895), 257 Versailles, Treaty of (1919), 274–75 Vespucci, Amerigo, 106 Vicksburg, battle of (1863), 247 Vienna, Congress of (1815), 275 Vietnam War: loss of U.S. credibility as issue in, 59–60 Peloponnesian War compared to, 60–61 U.S. casualties in, 58–59 violence: economy of, 119 as means to an end, 111 Virgil, 84, 85, 87, 207–8 virtù, 108, 112, 119 Wallace, Henry A., 298, 301 Walsingham, Francis, 139, 140, 141 war, 215 alignment of means with ends in, 204, 215; see also grand strategy; strategy Athenian democratizing of, 39 chance in, 210–11 Clausewitz’s definition of, 195, 237 gap between theory and practice of, 185–89, 190, 195–96, 201–2, 208 as instrument of policy, 197–98, 215, 264, 273, 312 peace vs., 100 scale in expansion of, 186, 198–99 shift of psychological balance in, 198, 203–4 space in expansion of, 185, 186, 198 time in expansion of, 186, 198 war, just, 101 Augustine on, 99, 102–3, 105, 111–12, 312 Machiavelli on, 111–12 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 5, 17–19, 61–62, 185–86, 190, 192–93, 199, 205–7, 211–13, 215–16, 217, 252–53 War of 1812, 179, 218, 266 war powers, 242, 247 Warsaw, Duchy of, 195 Washington, George, 159, 165, 169–70, 218 Waterloo, battle of, 26 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 115, 161 Welles, Gideon, 233, 242 Wellington, Duke of, 26 West Germany, 59 Westphalia, Treaty of (1648), 115, 116 westward expansion, 177–78, 250–51 Wheeler-Bennett, John, 297 Whigs, 223–24, 225, 232 Wilentz, Sean, 219 Wilkes, Charles, 246 William I, king of England, 162 William II, kaiser of Germany, 257, 262 William III, king of England, 157 Williams, John, 68, 89 Willkie, Wendell, 285 Wilson, A.

pages: 939 words: 274,289

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace
by H. W. Brands
Published 1 Oct 2012

He did not explain but simply asked that the resignation take effect on the last day of July, four months hence. The adjutant general, on the recommendation of Colonel Buchanan, accepted the resignation and the proposed timing. 9 WHEN GRANT HELPED GEORGE McCLELLAN ORGANIZE HIS SURVEY of a route for a transcontinental railroad, they both acted in implicit alliance with Stephen Douglas. The Illinois Democrat headed the Senate committee on federal territories, which set the rules for administering and organizing most of the trans-Missouri West. Douglas recognized railroads as the transforming technology of the era, and he saw that railroads could make Chicago, as yet a modest town on the shore of Lake Michigan but one in which he had sizable investments, the great metropolis of the West.

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But the positive reaction to the proclamation inspired the president to broader reform; he called on Congress to approve and send to the states a thirteenth, emancipating amendment to the Constitution, which the legislature duly did. Aiding business came more easily. Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress raised tariffs, boosting the profits of American manufacturers. They underwrote a transcontinental railroad, immediately throwing contracts to the hundreds of firms engaged in the construction of the road and prospectively knitting the country into a vast single marketplace for the purveyors of American products. They established a national currency and a national banking system, to enhance the war effort but to facilitate commerce as well.

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The commander, William Fetterman, a Civil War veteran, had boasted that with eighty men he could ride through the entire Sioux nation. With eighty-one men he rode into Crazy Horse’s trap, and he and his men were annihilated. The conflict escalated further with the approach of construction crews of the transcontinental railroad. The Indians of the region hadn’t seen trains before, but they quickly realized that these trains weren’t like wagon trains, here today and gone tomorrow. The railroad established a permanent white presence and consequently a more serious threat to the indigenes’ way of life. When the railroad trains disgorged buffalo hunters who slaughtered the herds on which the Indians depended for food, clothing, shelter and fuel, the conflict became irrepressible.

Smart Cities, Digital Nations
by Caspar Herzberg
Published 13 Apr 2017

After listening to endless questions about when Songdo’s NEATT building would open its doors, it is refreshing to discover, via Glaeser, that the Empire State Building did not reach maximum occupancy until the post–World War II boom, more than a decade after its completion.13 The growth and distinguishing of new cities is a process that takes years, if not decades. On occasion, smart city technology is compared to the rise of the railway in the nineteenth century. Prototypes of the steam engine, barely functional and of little practical use, appeared intermittently during the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s. The Transcontinental Railroad, a symbol of the technology’s triumph over a continent, was not finished until 1869. If railway technology is used as a standard for comparison, smart cities are still in the early phases. Having said that, technology development has accelerated. The best evidence of the efficacy of the Internet of Everything may be the human mind and its capabilities for collective action.

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See also individual cities free economic zones in, 64–65, 75 GDP of, 62 multinational interest in, 63–64 new cities in, 19, 23 obesity in, 173 urban population growth of, 19 Streetline, 152 Success, recognizing, 214–15 Surveillance systems, 110, 111, 117, 203–4, 205–6 Sustainability, 174–75, 185, 199–200 T Telepresence (TP), 55, 77, 83, 193–95, 210 Tianfu Software Park, 104–6 Tomorrow City, 67–68 Townsend, Anthony, 66, 176, 178, 180, 186 Transcontinental Railroad, 188 Transport, importance of, 182–84, 189 Travel, future of, 201–2 Trias, Xavier, 151 Tsunami warning systems, 203–4 U U-Life, 71, 73, 75, 79, 81–82, 193 United Arab Emirates, 41, 47, 183. See also individual cities U.S. Green Building Council, 78 W Wang Lijun, 112 Washington, D.C., 184 Water, 197 Worksites, remote, 166–67, 201–2 World Bank, 171 X X Prize Foundation, 196 Z Zhejiang University, 114, 203 ZTE Corporation, 117 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK was born out of my desire to tell the story of building smart cities from the perspective of a small group of men and women in a multinational company.

pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream
by Arianna Huffington
Published 7 Sep 2010

For example, in the 1880s, as the post–Civil War Gilded Age came to an end, a severe economic crisis began that culminated in the depression of 1893.142 But the search for scapegoats among the American people began early. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended immigration from China, after Chinese immigrants had just helped build the transcontinental railroad.143 Attacks on the Chinese by white mobs took place all over the country. One newspaperman captured the mood of the times: “Why permit an army of leprous, prosperity-sucking, progress-blasting Asiatics befoul our thoroughfares, degrade the city, repel immigration, drive out our people, break up our homes, take employment from our countrymen, corrupt the morals of our youth, establish opium joints, buy or steal the babe of poverty or slave, and taint with their brothels the lives of our young men?”

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George Washington knew that without a national system of transportation, especially canals that would connect the East Coast to the Ohio and Mississippi river systems, we could never truly come together as a “more perfect union.”1 Thomas Jefferson put Washington’s vision into effect, creating a concrete national plan for roads and canals—a far-sighted plan that served as the touchstone for the next hundred years of development and led to America’s transcontinental railroad, championed by Abraham Lincoln. Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent massive federal dollars, even in the midst of the Great Depression, to bring electricity to rural America. Dwight Eisenhower pushed through the interstate highway system. Building things—amazing things, grand things, forward-looking things, useful things—has always been an integral part of who we are as a country.

pages: 240 words: 75,304

Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time
by Clark Blaise
Published 27 Oct 2000

Many more signed on with American railroads. 5 The Decade of Time, 1875–85 BY THE MIDDLE of the 1870s, the assertion of human reason over the processes of nature was yielding discoveries and inventions in all the arts and sciences that lent that famous Victorian confidence to the notion that man was no longer the passive inheritor of an ordained “natural” universe. All of nature was his to discover and mold. The ability to communicate instantaneously by voice, to light the dark, the luxurious trans-Atlantic steamers, the transcontinental railroads, a new personal printing press called the typewriter, bound the world in exciting and, for some, alarming new ways. But the outworn shell of time, those heavy boots inherited from tradition, from nature, were impeding progress. Societies were moving faster than their ability to measure.

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Meticulous planning and astronomical start-up costs entered the calculation for any new enterprise, and London and Continental banks oversaw bond issues for projects that might have seemed fanciful only a generation earlier: undersea cables, new shipyards, new steel mills, new mining equipment; transcontinental railroads spanning Canada, South Africa, America, India; telegraphs down the African coast. The new technology ran on coal, on more coal than traditional methods could ever extract. Workers had to be at least semiskilled just to handle the demands of the new technology, and, in the end, many grew sufficiently confident to challenge ancient wisdom, or to suggest shortcuts to greater efficiency.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

Silent Partner When we think about the creation of frontiers in the history of capitalism we imagine the companies and the men who led and achieved vast wealth from these endeavors. Less emphasized is the central role of governments in making capitalist frontiers. The Union Pacific Railroad, America’s first transcontinental railroad, which connected the East and West Coasts, was funded by US government bonds approved in a series of congressional acts beginning with the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act. The railroad companies involved in the project received 175 million acres of public land between 1850 and 1871. Also to the benefit of companies and settlers, the US military cleared the land of Native Americans—a population that the historian Alan Trachtenberg argues was seen as “the utmost antithesis to an America dedicated to productivity, profit, and private property.”68 In short, private property and corporate rights in the new western frontier were enforced by a deep partnership between US companies, the federal government, and the military.

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Although many are aware that the first version of the internet, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), was created by the Department of Defense in the late 1960s, most people familiar with the internet’s creation assume that when the government gave the internet to private telecoms in the early nineties it reduced its role in the digital world. Snowden revealed that this perception couldn’t be further from the truth. Like the transcontinental railroad and the conquering of the West, the digital frontier is being made through a deep partnership between Silicon Valley and the US government. This partnership takes myriad forms. For example, tech titans marketize technologies developed by the military; according to the technology writer Peter Nowak it is nearly “impossible to separate any American-made technology from the American military.”69 The US government uses its influence in international institutions and its nearly eight hundred military bases abroad to open doors for US tech companies globally.

pages: 58 words: 18,747

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 6 Mar 2012

It makes sense for land to be a speculative commodity. For one thing, it’s hard to make more land. And the desirability of different patches of land can change over time. When the Erie Canal connected the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, the port of New York City became a better place to do business. The construction of the Transcontinental Railroad added value to the land along the route. The invention of the automobile and the subsequent construction of a nationwide network of highways reduced the value of proximity to train stations and central cities. The invention of affordable air-conditioning made Phoenix a much more desirable place to live.

Coastal California
by Lonely Planet

CHINATOWN Chinatown & North Beach Top Sights City Lights BookstoreB4 Coit TowerC1 Sights 1Beat MuseumC3 2Bob Kaufman AlleyB2 3Chinese Culture CenterC5 4Chinese Historical Society of America MuseumB6 5Columbus TowerC4 6Dragon GateC7 7Old St Mary's ChurchC6 8Portsmouth SquareC5 9Ross AlleyB5 10Saints Peter & Paul ChurchA2 11Spofford AlleyB5 12Waverly PlaceB5 Activities, Courses & Tours 13Chinatown Alleyways ToursC5 Sleeping 14Hotel BohèmeB3 15Washington Square InnA2 Eating 16CinecittàA2 17City ViewC5 18CoiD3 19CotognaD4 20House of NankingC4 21IdealeB3 22Liguria BakeryA1 23MolinariB3 24Tony's Coal-fired Pizza & Slice HouseA2 25Yuet LeeB3 Drinking 26Caffe TriesteB3 27Comstock SaloonC4 28Li PoC5 29Specs'C3 30Tosca CafeC4 Entertainment 31Beach Blanket BabylonA3 32Purple OnionC4 Shopping 33Golden Gate Fortune Cookie CompanyB5 Chinese Historical Society of America Museum MUSEUM ( 415-391-1188; www.chsa.org; 965 Clay St; adult/child $5/2, first Tue of month free; noon-5pm Tue-Fri, 11am-4pm Sat) Picture what it was like to be Chinese in America during the Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad construction or in the Beat heyday at the nation’s largest Chinese American historical institute. There are rotating exhibits across the courtyard in CHSA’s graceful red-brick, green-tile-roofed landmark building, built as Chinatown’s YWCA in 1932 by Julia Morgan, chief architect of Hearst Castle.

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Top History Books » California: A History (Kevin Starr) » A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush (Joshua Paddison) » Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (Marc Reisner) Thousands of imported Chinese laborers helped complete the transcontinental railroad in 1869, which opened up markets on both coasts and further spurred migration to the Golden State. Mexican immigrants arrived during the 1910–21 Mexican Revolution and again during WWII to fill labor shortages. During WWII, military-driven industries developed, while anti-Asian sentiments led to the internment of many Japanese Americans, especially those living in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

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RICHES FROM RAILROADS & REAL ESTATE In 1873, German immigrant and San Francisco store owner Levi Strauss received a patent for his hard-wearing, riveted denim pants, originally designed for California’s gold prospectors – and, voilà! – American blue jeans were born. Opening the floodgates to massive migration into the West in 1869, the transcontinental railroad shortened the trip from New York to San Francisco from two months to less than four days, elevating the latter to California’s metropolitan center. Meanwhile, Southern California’s parched climate, its distance from water resources, and relatively small population made it less attractive to profit-minded railroad moguls, though wheeling and dealing finally resulted in a spur line to LA in 1876.

pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline
by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson
Published 5 Feb 2019

You find it in the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s, which fought to stem the flood of German and Irish Catholics who were the latest contribution to the American melting pot. After the Civil War, white Protestants sounded the cry over the “yellow peril,” the tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants who carried out the hard, dirty, dangerous, and ill-paid work of building the transcontinental railroad. They also worked in the mines and in the fields. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited Chinese immigration. Chinese migrants already resident could not marry white women or obtain citizenship. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, steam-powered vessels made it possible to bring many more immigrants to American shores.

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There was no new land left to farm, and few prospects for young men and women in the old country. They took Sifton’s advice. Beginning in the 1890s, immigrants by the millions flooded across the Atlantic to Halifax’s Pier 21—the Ellis Island of Canadian immigration—then headed west using the new transcontinental railroad to Manitoba and Saskatchewan and Alberta, mixing with new arrivals from America, many of them immigrants from the same parts of Europe. Sifton’s gamble paid off, handsomely. Eastern Europeans not only stocked Prairie Canada but became integral to the Canadian mosaic. As one wag observed, without Clifford Sifton we would never have had Wayne Gretzky.411 Lesson learned.

pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream
by R. Christopher Whalen
Published 7 Dec 2010

The discovery [of gold] at Coloma commenced a revolution that rumbled across the oceans and continents to the ends of the earth, and echoed down the decades to the dawn of the third millennium. The revolution manifested itself demographically, in drawing hundreds of thousands of people to California; politically, in propelling America along the path to the Civil War; economically, in spurring the construction of the transcontinental railroad. But beyond everything else, the Gold Rush established a new template for the American dream. America had always been the land of promise, but never had the promise been so decidedly—so gloriously—material. The new dream held out the hope that anyone could have what everyone wants: respite from toil, security in old age, a better life for one’s children.33 The Rise of Bank Clearinghouses Another significant development in the history of the American monetary system prior to the Civil War that deserves attention is the creation of private clearinghouses around the country to help banks manage their payments and liquidity.

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With the passage of the National Bank Act in 1865, the connection between specie and paper money had in theory been stabilized. Yet as the gold market operation of Fisk and Gould four years later illustrates, speculating on changes in the paper value of gold had become a means to wager on the basic unit of account and therefore on the value of the U.S. economy. The year 1869 also marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a project championed by the railroad lawyer Lincoln, and with it a long period of capital expenditure. Some observers believe that the crisis in the gold markets was the precursor to the financial and economic crisis four years later known as the Panic of 1873, which put the United States and much of the world into years of political and economic turmoil.

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Thomas Amendment Thrifts, government-subsidized term liquidity (provision) Thrift stamps, purchase Timberlake, Richard Todd, Walker debt analysis “Federal Reserve Board and the Rise of the Corporate State” “History of International Lending” Total debt (1929-1996) Trade balance, impact Trade restraint cases Transcontinental railroad, completion (1869) Treaty of Ghent Treaty of Versailles Triffin, Robert (Gold and the Dollar Crisis) Triffin’s dilemma, U.S. dollar (relationship) Truman, Harry S. administration, housing focus succession Trusts growth investment vehicles Tugwell, Rexford G. Twain, Mark Tweed, “Boss” William Fisk/Gould connections Tyler, John cabinet, defection/appointment Unconscious revolution Underwood Tariff Unemployment increase (1970s) insurance, increase Nixon observation Unemployment (1837) Unemployment level (1950s) Union Pacific Railroad, Gould control Unitary government, Hamilton support United Kingdom adjustment loan receipt deflation, initiation Fed policy, Hoover dissuasion food prices, WWI control war finances, Keynes assistance United States banking system crisis flaw pressure, intensification Confederation, problems confidence, FDR (impact) consumption/opportunity, maintenance currency system, flaw debt growth debtor position (WWI) deflation economic growth, drag economic output (WWI), decline economic resurgence, European goods flow dependence economy performance post-WWI correction recession WWI, impact exports increase (WWI) Fed accommodation post-WWI decrease external account, surplus account factories, productivity (increase) farm acreage, WWI growth farm sector, WWI profits federal debt annual average maturity reduction (WWI) financial system, shortcomings fiscal discipline fiscal/monetary regimes, change fiscal stringency, acceptance foreign nation subsidy, provision government bonds, sale inflationary tendencies spending habits, change industrialization industrial power, rise interest rate, increase interventionist tendency markets, speculative character military outlays, decrease military spending (1945-1996) money supply, growth money supply, growth (1867-1960) nominal GDP, comparison output, inflation-adjusted decline political challenges public sector debt, equivalence real economy, deterioration recession (1927) reputation, damage reserve currency, burden (easing) slaves, importation (illegality) stock valuations, arguments tactical/strategic situation tariff protection, WWI increase trade balance (1960-1972) trade protectionism, post-WWI return transformation unemployment (1873) wealth, appearance World War I, impact United States Bank of Pennsylvania, charter Urban America, transformation U.S.

pages: 304 words: 87,702

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life
by Pam Grout
Published 14 May 2007

* * * QUICK OREGON TRAIL FACTS Although the first Oregon Trail emigrants were Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, who made the trip in 1836, the big wave didn’t begin until 1843. Over the next 25 years, more than half a million people went west in search of new land and new lives. The average trip took six months from Independence, Missouri, to the Oregon Territory. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 brought the Oregon Trail’s glory days to an abrupt halt. A common misperception is that Native Americans posed the biggest problem. Quite the contrary, most local tribes were quite friendly, even helping emigrants pull wagons out of ditches and trading with them for supplies. The real enemies were cholera, poor sanitation, drownings (in 1850 alone, 37 drowned crossing the Green River), and—somewhat surprisingly—accidental gunshots.

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Rates for a summer week at C Lazy U range from $2,300 to $2,975, including all meals and activities; winter rates start at $245 per night, again including meals. C Lazy U, 3640 State Highway 125, P.O. Box 379, Granby, CO, 80446, 970-887-3344, www.clazyu.com. Devil’s Thumb Ranch. Located in a beautiful meadow with stunning views of the mountains at the Continental Divide, this ranch, too, was on the stagecoach route before the transcontinental railroad opened in 1869. The current owners of this “4,000 acres of raw Colorado,” as they call it, are winning lots of eco-awards, including one from the Environmental Protection Agency, for their commitment to keeping this amazing ranch in Fraser Valley as natural and pristine as possible. Not only did Suzanne and Bob Fanch import the Broad Axe Barn (which serves as the spa and the activities center) from a farm in Indiana, thereby eliminating the need to cut down additional trees, but the new lodge and the 16 luxury log cabins are geothermally heated, using the Earth’s own natural heat.

The rough guide to the Grand Canyon
by Greg Ward and Rough Guides
Published 27 May 2003

RIZONA )TS NORTHERN BORDER COMPRISES A MILE STRETCH OF THE #OLORADO AT THE EXTREME WESTERN END OF THE 'RAND #ANYON FROM WHICH THE RESERVATION EXTENDS SOUTH ON AVERAGE BETWEEN TWENTY AND THIRTY MILES n JUST FAR ENOUGH TO INCLUDE THIRTEEN MILE SECTIONS OF BOTH THE ORIGINAL 2OUTE AND PARALLEL TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD 3TRADDLING THE HIGHWAY IS THE RESERVATIONS ONLY TOWN 0EACH 3PRINGS HOME TO JUST UNDER A THOUSAND OF THE TOTAL (UALAPAI POPULATION OF AROUND 4HE TRIBES MAIN BUSINESS THESE DAYS IS TOURISM n SPECIlCALLY PROMOTING A CLUSTER OF RIM SIDE OVERLOOKS AS 'RAND #ANYON 7EST OR THE 7EST 2IM OF THE 'RAND #ANYON 4HIS CANNY PIECE OF MARKETING IS AIMED SQUARELY AT THE MILLION TOURISTS WHO mOCK TO ,AS 6EGAS EACH YEAR4HE (UALAPAI RESERVATION IS THE CLOSEST SPOT TO 6EGAS THAT OFFERS CANYON VIEWS AND MOST OF ITS VISITORS ARE lRST TIME DAY TRIPPERS WHO ARE UNAWARE THEYRE NOT SEEING THE CANYON AT ITS BEST !

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RIZONA 3TRIP AND FAILED TO CROSS THE RIVER AT THE SITE OF ,EES &ERRY4HAT SAME YEAR &ATHER 'ARCÏS FROM 4UCSON PENETRATED WHAT HE CALLED A hCALABOOSE OF CLIFFS AND CANYONSv TO VISIT THE (AVASUPAI IN THE WESTERN CANYON *OHN 7ESLEY 0OWELL /NE OR TWO MOUNTAIN MEN AND TRAPPERS MAY HAVE SEEN THE 'RAND #ANYON DURING THE lRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BUT BY THE TIME JURISDICTION OVER THE REGION PASSED FROM -EXICO TO THE 5NITED 3TATES IN IT HAD YET TO BE SURVEYED AND DID NOT EVEN HAVE A lXED NAME4O THE (AVASUPAI IT WAS 7IKATATA h2OUGH 2IMv 3PANISH MAPS SHOWED IT AS THE 2ÓO -UY 'RANDE h6ERY "IG 2IVERv AND 9ANKEE PROSPECTORS KNEW IT AS THE "IG #A×ØN 4HE lRST SERIOUS ATTEMPT TO EXPLORE IT CAME IN WHEN THE 53 7AR $EPARTMENT INSTRUCTED ,IEUTENANT *OSEPH #HRISTMAS )VES TO lND OUT IF THE #OLORADO 2IVER WAS NAVIGABLE BY STEAMBOAT ,IKE HIS 3PANISH PREDECESSORS )VES GOT LITTLE FARTHER THAN THE FUTURE (OOVER $AM SITE BUT HE THEN CONTINUED ON FOOT ALL THE WAY TO THE ,ITTLE #OLORADO 2IVER 4HOUGH AN ACCOMPANYING GEOLOGIST MADE THE lRST ACCURATE SCIENTIlC OBSERVATIONS OF THE CANYON THE EXPE DITION IS BEST REMEMBERED FOR )VES OWN VERY NEGATIVE ASSESSMENT h4HE REGION IS OF COURSE ALTOGETHER VALUELESS x /URS HAS BEEN THE lRST AND WILL DOUBTLESS BE THE LAST PARTY OF WHITES TO VISIT THIS PROlTLESS LOCALITYv 4HE NAME 'RAND #ANYON lRST USED ON A MAP IN WAS POPULARIZED BY THE ONE ARMED #IVIL 7AR VETERAN *OHN 7ESLEY 0OWELL WHOSE DRAMATIC BOAT TRIP ALONG THE FEARSOME AND UNCHARTED #OLORADO CAPTURED PUBLIC IMAGINA TION 3UCH A TRIP HAD LONG BEEN MULLED BUT IN THE WORDS OF *OHN &RÏMONT THE LEGENDARY h0ATHlNDERv OF THE 7EST hNO TRAPPERS HAVE BEEN FOUND BOLD ENOUGH TO UNDERTAKE A VOYAGE WHICH HAS SO CERTAIN A PROSPECT OF A FATAL TERMINATIONv # /.4% 843 \ (ISTORY 0OWELLS TEN MAN #OLORADO 2IVER %XPLORING %XPEDITION SET OFF FROM 'REEN 2IVER 7YOMING ON -AY 4HIS WAS JUST TWO WEEKS AFTER THE COMPLETION OF THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD WHICH CARRIED HIS FOUR HEAVY 7HITEHALL OAK ROWING BOATS HERE FROM #HICAGO !NOTHER EXPEDITION LED BY 4HOMAS (OOK SET OFF A FEW DAYS LATER BUT WAS ABANDONED ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER (OOK DROWNED IN A RAPID 0OWELL HIMSELF SOON LOST ONE OF HIS BOATS BUT HE REACHED WHAT WOULD BECOME 'REEN 2IVER 5TAH ON *ULY THEN THE PREVI OUSLY UNSEEN CONmUENCE OF THE 'REEN AND LARGER 'RAND RIVERS WHICH MARKS THE START OF THE #OLORADO ON *ULY AND THE MOUTH OF THE 3AN *UAN ON *ULY &ROM WHATS NOW ,EES &ERRY HE LAUNCHED HIMSELF INTO THE 'RAND #ANYON ON !

pages: 1,230 words: 357,848

Andrew Carnegie
by David Nasaw
Published 15 Nov 2007

In the summer of 1862, President Lincoln signed legislation authorizing two new companies to construct that road with federal subsidies. The Union Pacific would lay track westward and the Central Pacific eastward until the two met somewhere between Omaha and Sacramento. Neither the Pennsylvania Railroad nor any of the eastern railroads participated in building the new transcontinental railroad, though every one of them expected to profit from increased east-west traffic when it was completed. Carnegie knew too much about the industry to invest directly in railroad stocks. It was less risky—and in the long run far more lucrative—to put his money in companies that had sweetheart contracts with the roads to supply coal, wood, and iron; to build their bridges; grade their crossings; manufacture their rails; and manufacture their rolling stock, locomotives, and specialized freight, passenger, and sleeping cars.

…

He was also public-spirited, “liberal in his charities,” and fond of books.11 That Carnegie was the subject of this front-page profile is testimony to his growing reputation in the railway industry, not as a builder but as a financial middleman. The only reference to his current business dealings appears at the end of the second to last paragraph when we are told that Carnegie has recently returned from a successful bond-selling trip to London. One year after the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, there were railroads, bridges, towns, and cities waiting to be built; and a young army of entrepreneurs eager to organize the labor, resources, and capital needed to get the job done. At the center of the enterprise were the bond traders, Carnegie among them. Federal and state governments contributed some funds, but the bulk of the capital needed to move forward had to be raised privately.

…

Carnegie blamed Scott for the debacle, claiming that it had been his decision to sell the stock; but that was not the case. The order to sell had come directly from Carnegie. It was, in retrospect, a wise decision. The UP was a losing proposition in the short term and Scott and Carnegie had no interest in any other term. As romantic as its quest had been—and remains even today—the first transcontinental railroad was not a profit-making enterprise. Its income, though growing, was not and would never be sufficient to pay off the interest on its bond issues. While “through traffic from the Pacific coast” had picked up, there was growing competition from other transcontinentals. “As for the future of the road,” the Railroad Gazette noted on March 16, 1872, “it is not very certain.”

Northern California Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Chinese Historical Society of AmericaMUSEUM (CHSA; MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %415-391-1188; www.chsa.org; 965 Clay St; adult/student/child $15/10/free; h11am-4pm Wed-Sun; c; g1, 8, 30, 45, jCalifornia, Powell-Mason, Powell-Hyde)F Picture what it was like to be Chinese in America during the gold rush, transcontinental railroad construction or Beat heyday in this 1932 landmark, built as Chinatown's YWCA by Julia Morgan (chief architect of Hearst Castle). CHSA historians unearth fascinating artifacts, from 1920s silk qipao dresses to Chinatown miniatures created by set designer Frank Wong. Exhibits reveal once-popular views of Chinatown, including the sensationalist opium-den exhibit at San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Expo inviting fairgoers to 'Go Slumming' in Chinatown.

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Although many were indentured servants who traded passage to the US in return for years of labor, they developed a thriving Chinatown and left an indelible mark on the region. These communities literally built the infrastructure of the city – as well as the levees and roads in the surrounding valley. Chinese also built much of the Transcontinental Railroad, though you won't see any among the faces of the ‘Big Four’ – Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Collis P Huntington and Charles Crocker. These wealthy men founded Central Pacific Railroad, which began construction here in 1863, and connected to the Union Pacific in Promontory, UT, in 1869. 1Sights Sacramento is roughly halfway between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe.

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The beer sampler is a great deal, as Auburn brings home tons of medals for its ales and pilsners, and the setting, with swirly stucco and a pressed-metal ceiling, is impressive. 8Information Auburn Area Chamber of Commerce ( GOOGLE MAP ; %530-885-5616; www.auburnchamber.net; 1103 High St; h10am-4pm Tue-Fri) In the Southern Pacific railroad depot at the north end of Lincoln Way, it has lots of useful local info and a monument to the Transcontinental Railroad nearby. Auburn State Recreation Area Office ( GOOGLE MAP ; %530-885-4527; 501 El Dorado St; h9am-4pm Mon-Fri) Information on sights and outdoor activities in the area. California Welcome Center (Placer County Visitors Center; GOOGLE MAP ; %530-887-2111; www.visitplacer.com; 1103 High St; h9am-4:30pm Mon-Sat, 11am-4pm Sun) Great information on Gold Country and eastward. 8Getting There & Away Amtrak ( GOOGLE MAP ; %800-872-7245; www.amtrak.com; 277 Nevada St) runs one train a day along the Capital Corridor route (http://capitolcorridor.org) linking Auburn with Sacramento ($16, one hour); other destinations require connecting with Thruway buses.

pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

Originally, the most efficient American lines were those private companies built because politicians guided publicly financed railroads to their home districts, however remote.27 Unlike European countries, the United States had hundreds of miles of sparsely populated areas to cover in order to join the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. The American government became a major sponsor of railroad construction, providing incentives in land grants to railroad companies. Real estate speculations abounded as building the transcontinental railroad became awash in graft. Despite this, laying railroads became an important adjunct to nation building for both Germany and the United States. By the last three decades of the nineteenth century the United States and Germany had nurtured the innovations that picked up the beat of economic development.

…

Turning toward the West, in 1871 Congress passed the Indian Appropriation Act, which made Native Americans national wards and nullified all previous Indian treaties. The Civil War had interrupted the efforts to integrate California into the nation; four years after Appomattox, the Central Pacific tracks joined those of the Union Pacific from the east. A gold spike attached the two at Promontory Point, Utah. The transcontinental railroad connected the two coasts of the United States, pulling in all the sparsely settled places in between. The victorious North was ready to impose its national vision upon both the South and the West. With the Civil War behind it, the United States could turn toward developing the vast tracks of unoccupied land acquired in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase and through the treaty that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848.

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If one passed up a moneymaking opportunity, another would see the potential gain in it. This is an optimal assessment that has to be balanced against the fact that capitalist wealth also created rich opportunities for graft such as the bribing of politicians by the builders of the American transcontinental railroads. At the beginning of the century the United States had fewer than four million people, almost all of whom lived on the Atlantic shelf on the North American continent. They had shared a common history for a very brief period. Germany, like the United States, was composed of disparate parts in 1776, but those disparate parts shared a history going back to the time of Charlemagne in the ninth century.

pages: 326 words: 97,089

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars
by Lee Billings
Published 2 Oct 2013

San Francisco became a bustling city. The redwood forests fell to feed furnaces that reduced quarry-hewn limestone into lime, which went into the cement for marble-faced buildings. By 1863, a transcontinental railroad was under construction, and the great opening of the American West had properly begun. All because of gold, by chance delivered in a Jurassic upwelling of magma beneath the sea. After the gold rush, the transcontinental railroad ensured that the surge of new settlers never truly abated. They rolled across the land in waves, chasing boom after boom, and at the end of each day, as the Sun fell into the Pacific, it set upon what appeared to be the truest expression of the American Dream.

pages: 104 words: 30,990

The Centrist Manifesto
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2013

We seem unable or unwilling to make the short-term sacrifices necessary to build a more prosperous society; the political system panders to that shortsighted view. This is a country that was built on huge public and private investments that paid dividends, decade after decade, generation after generation: the land grant universities, the interstate highway system, the transcontinental railroad. There is a set of famous research studies from the 1960s and 1970s in which young children were placed in a room alone. On a table in front of them was a desirable treat or toy, such as a marshmallow. Each child could eat the treat or take the toy at any point; however, the children were also told that if they avoided eating the tantalizing treat for a short period, then they would get two treats once the time elapsed.

Coastal California Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

…

In 1873 German immigrant and San Francisco store owner Levi Strauss received a patent for his hard-wearing, riveted denim pants, originally designed for California’s gold prospectors and – voilà! – American blue jeans were born. Riches from Railroads, Real Estate & Oil Opening the floodgates to massive migration into the West in 1869, the transcontinental railroad shortened the trip from New York to San Francisco from two months to less than four days. Nouveau riche San Francisco became California’s metropolitan center. Meanwhile, Southern California’s parched climate, its distance from water resources and relatively small population made it less attractive to profit-minded railroad moguls, though wheeling and dealing finally resulted in a spur line to LA during the mid-1870s.

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Mexico inherits 21 Catholic missions in various states of disrepair, but quickly reorganizes Alta California into ranchos (land grants). 1826–32 Teenage Kit Carson helps blaze the Santa Fe Trail, which eventually leads to Los Angeles through 900 miles of rattlesnake-filled high desert and plains guarded by Native American tribes. 1848 After winning the Mexican-American War and signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the US takes control of Alta California, just as gold is discovered in the Sierra Nevada foothills. 1850 After debate about whether it would be a slaveholding or free state (Congress chooses the latter), California enters the Union. Its first constitution is written in both Spanish and English. 1869 A golden spike is nailed in Utah, completing the first transcontinental railroad linking California with the East Coast. Gold is uncovered outside San Diego, unleashing a mini mining frenzy. 1882 The US Chinese Exclusion Act suspends new immigration from China, denies citizenship to those already in the country and sanctions racially targeted laws that stay on the books until 1943. 1892 Oil is discovered by Edward Doheny in Downtown LA, near where Dodger Stadium stands today, sparking a major oil boom.

pages: 134 words: 39,353

The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
by Gay Talese and Bruce Davidson
Published 1 Jan 2003

Later a fifteen-mile parade marched across it, President Grant applauded from the reviewing stand, General Sherman drove in the last spike on the Illinois side, and Andrew Carnegie, who had been selling bonds for the project, made his first fortune. The bridge was suddenly instrumental in the development of St. Louis as the most important city on the Mississippi River, and it helped develop the transcontinental railroad systems. It was credited with "the winning of the West" and was pictured on a United States stamp in 1898; and in 1920 James Buchanan Eads became the first engineer elected to the American Hall of Fame. He died an unhappy man. A project he envisioned across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec did not work out.

Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
by Weimar Gay
Published 31 Dec 2001

He turned this later into Weingart. The woman’s name was Miller. 120 William A. Clark was one of the ten richest men in America. He owned the United Verde copper mine in Arizona and silver mines in Montana. He had been an architect of Montana statehood. In 1899, Clark offered to bring Los Angeles another transcontinental railroad connection. The new line wouldn’t be part of any railroad trust. It would lower the rates for freight, and force the Union Pacific to do the same. City officials in Los Angeles gave Clark the franchise to build a thousand-mile rail line from the city’s port at San Pedro to the Salt Lake City terminus of the Union Pacific.

pages: 369 words: 121,161

Alistair Cooke's America
by Alistair Cooke
Published 1 Oct 2008

They started with the familiar East, but then the curtain went up on the blue Appalachians and, beyond, an ocean of prairie and scudding convoys of buffalo pursued by flotillas of redskins; then the land soared up to the famous Rockies and dipped again to another crumpled plain and semidesert, and then true desert, till the fabulous Sierras unloosed their cascading waterfalls; and over their watershed the continent tumbled in glory to golden valleys and the Lewis and Clark wonder of the sailless Pacific. Until the war was over the transcontinental railroad was a giant enterprise stalled by much bickering between a reluctant Congress and the Army, which had clamored for it. If it had been left to the government it would have taken another twenty years to complete. But it was a commercial venture, and it was fortunately fed by the adrenaline of competition.

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John 51, 52–3 Smith, Sir Thomas 49 Smithsonian Institution 288 Spanish explorations 20–37. see also New Spain Spice Islands 21 Staël, Mme de 205 Stamp Act 78, 92 Standard Oil Company of Ohio 195 Stanford, Leland 174 steamboats 151, 152 steel industry 196–7 Stevenson, Adlai E. 225 stock market crash (1929) 245–6 stockyards 176 Strategic Air Command 272–6 suburbs 283–5, 286 Supreme Court 113–16, 155, 156, 164, 222, 223, 249, 289, 290 Sutherland, Justice George 115 Sutter, Johann August 135–6 Szilard, Leo 263 Taft, William Howard 224, 225 Talleyrand, Charles 129 Tammany organization 217, 230 taxation of the colonies 77–9, 81–2 Tecumseh (Shawnee chief) 132 telegraph, invention of 190 Teller, Edward 263 Thoroughgood, Adam 55 Tippecanoe, battle of 132 tobacco 52–3, 55, 56 Tocqueville, Alexis de 13, 15, 153 Tojo, Gen. Hideki 259 Torrio, Johnny 245 Toussaint L’Ouverture, Pierre 128 Townsend, Charles 79 Tracy, Marquis de 40–41 transcontinental railroad 171–5 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory 225 Truman, Harry 164, 235, 247, 266, 290 Tudor, Frederic 282–3 Turkey Red wheat 11, 178 Turner, Nat 291 Twain, Mark 1, 4, 7 Tweed, William Marcy “Boss” 217 United Nations 102, 266–8, 271, 293 United States Steel Corp. 197, 223 Ustinov, Peter 71 Valley Forge, Pa. 89, 293 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 200 Vanderbilt, William K. 201 Verrazano, Giovanni 37 Versailles, Treaty of 231, 231–2, 234 Vespucci, Amerigo 19 Victoria (queen) 119, 178, 181, 206 Vietnam War 269–70 Vinci, Leonardo da 22 Voltaire 46 wagon trains 137–43, 145 Walker, Thomas 123 War of 181–2, 132 Warren, Chief Justice Earl 116, 290 Warren Joseph 80 Washington, George 74, 78, 87–90, 91, 99, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, no, 132, 162, 209, 253, 254, 258, 293 Washington, Martha 88, 89 Wells, H.

pages: 405 words: 113,895

The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels
by Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans
Published 11 Mar 2024

Settlers and migrants from across the country and around the world arrived in search of gold and sun. A once quiet pueblo town turned into a lawless western outpost. Los Angeles, in the words of journalist D. J. Waldie, “drank, whored, brawled, lynched, and murdered” itself into infamy. The completion of the Southern Pacific’s transcontinental railroad brought still more growth and a new desire for respectability. A town of fewer than 6,000 in 1870 burst into a city with more than 100,000 inhabitants by 1900. Suddenly, leaving last night’s vigilante murder victim in an unmarked grave seemed uncivilized, and the city faced new questions about how to handle its indigent dead.

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See also individual people public cemeteries, 6–7, 8–9, 10 public guardian, 72, 96, 98 public information officer, 151, 155 Q quasi-property, classification of, 154 R Ramos, Marjorie (Lena’s niece), 30–31, 34, 69–70, 96, 136, 147, 234, 279n95 Rat Pack, 37 Ravished Armenia, 11 Reagan, Ronald, 292n177 Reed, Sherry, 283n114 registered domestic partners, 105 Reitman, Janet, 272n38 Riverside National Cemetery, 170–73, 175, 182–85, 191, 193–94, 198, 230 Rogers, Alix, 289n154 Rogers, Fred, 213–14 Rorke, Susan, 147–49, 218–20, 243–45 Rose Bowl Parade, 64 Rose Hill Mortuary, 170 Rose Hills Cemetery, 210 Rosoff, Karen, 147–49, 218 Royal Park Apartments, 74–75, 80, 82–83, 129, 179 S “safe surrender” bill, 185–86 Salk, Jonas, 162 San Diego Union-Tribune, 161, 164, 185 San Quentin State Prison, 100 Sanchez, Michael, 84–85 Santander, 124 sassafras urn, 190 Schleuss, Jon, 151–52, 153, 155, 222–23 Sciarra, Carmine, 177–78 Scientology, 37–39, 73, 74, 77–79, 86 sepulcher, right of, 10, 154 Service Corporation International, 122, 170, 278n92 Shapiro, Leona, 31–32, 33–34, 68–69, 70, 71–72, 97–98, 99–100 Sheffler, Samuel, 247 Shoshone Nation people, 36 Sinclair, Upton, 9–10 sky burials, 145 small asset estates, 279–80n98 Smith, David, 183, 250 smog, 36 Smolenyak, Megan, 13, 279n95 Snake Hill Cemetery, 10 So Cal Patriot Guard Riders, 182–83, 184, 197 “social death,” 70 social isolation, 76, 231, 237, 248 Social Security/Social Security Administration, 23, 32, 33, 56, 96, 106–7, 116, 126, 128, 158 soldier’s creed, 196 Solis, Hilda, 286n143 South Korea, 228, 236 Southern Pacific transcontinental railroad, 8 Sparks Scientology Center, 40 Spencer, David Grafton assets of, 126, 128, 129–30 background of, 35–42 confusion in case of, 174–75, 181–82 death of, 178–79 funeral for, 175–76, 234 interment of, 176–77, 178 investigation of death of, 80–81, 82–89 later years of, 73–79 next of kin of, 125–27 obituary of, 174 Spencer, Juanita (David’s mother), 35, 126 Spencer, Judith Lee (David’s sister), 35, 126, 130, 131 Spencer, Orrie Grafton, Jr.

pages: 650 words: 204,878

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
by Edwin Lefèvre and William J. O'Neil
Published 14 May 1923

Harriman eventually took control of the Union Pacifi c, which he helped take out of bankruptcy in 1898. The railroad expanded rapidly through a string of acquisitions. First there was a pair of lines in Oregon, then the purchase of the large Southern Pacific system in February 1901. Soon Harriman’s road dominated the territory west from Omaha, across the original Transcontinental Railroad through Wyoming and Utah before splitting south to San Francisco in California and north to Oregon and Washington. Kuhn, Loeb & Co., led by Jacob Schiff (see photo on next page), became Harriman’s banker. Together they formed a syndicate with capital backing from the Rockefellers of Standard Oil, the Vanderbilts, and the Goulds.19 A battle between Harriman and rival tycoon J.P.

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On April 26, the New York Times reported that the San Francisco disaster resulted in a plunge of 12.5% on the New York Stock Exchange, wiping out $1 billion in market capitalization. British insurers were particularly hard hit by the disaster, as shares of leading underwriters, such as London & Lancashire, fell as much as 30%. Even before the transcontinental railroad was built in 1869, San Francisco was an international trade hub connecting California’s mining and There I was, short five thousand shares of UP on a hunch. That was as much as I could sell in Harding’s office with the margin I had up. It was too much stock for me to be short of, on a vacation; so I gave up the vacation and returned to New York that very night.

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Said Minnigerode: “And when it was announced, the stocks of all his corporations rose in a rejoicing market.”52 19.16 Collis P. Huntington was one of the men responsible for building the Central Pacific Railroad, which joined with the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit in Utah to form the First Transcontinental Railroad. Afterward, Huntington would work with a number of other railroads, including the Southern Pacific and the Chesapeake & Ohio. Born in Connecticut in 1821, he sailed for San Francisco in 1849 and operated a general store out of a tent. Later, his business grew to be one of the most prosperous on the Pacific coast.

pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

Destructive though it was, the Civil War broke the slaveocracy’s power to obstruct an American development agenda. In one of the darkest years of the war, the Republican congress passed the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act—no other country had conceived the possibility of educating its farmers and craftsmen—and the Transcontinental Railroad Act. The rise of a new world economic hyperpower was virtually assured. The book closes with both epilogue and prologue. Chapter 8 is a compressed account of how America caught up to and finally surpassed Great Britain in the decades after the Civil War. That story highlights the great advantages possessed by a fast-growing, emerging power moving to supplant an older incumbent.

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When asked if he could build it, an engineer affirmed that he could, and could finish on time, “provided you don’t care what it costs.”54 But the true miracle was navigating the shoals of politics and finance in a notoriously corrupt age, while fending off Wall Street’s banditti. For comparison, the transcontinental railroad authorized by Congress the next decade was completed in about one-third the time, even though it crossed the Rockies. There were multiple close calls. Several times the planned route turned out to be impassable, and by pure luck, another acceptable path was found.55 And the road was often on the verge of bankruptcy.

pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin
Published 30 Apr 2019

America's pioneers first went west on foot or by horse, raft, or canoe. But once towns were established at the far end of the trail, we took steps to greatly facilitate travel. We built turnpikes, and canals, and ultimately opened the way for all to move quickly and easily coast to coast with the Transcontinental Railroad. The first settlers of the moon and Mars will no doubt rough it at high cost and considerable discomfort in cramped little rockets. But their children or grandchildren will travel in style on the Transorbital Railroad. Figure 3.4. On to Mars! FOCUS SECTION: VIRTUAL REALITY The spaceflight revolution will make it possible for millions of people to travel through space from point to point on Earth, and for thousands to people to travel across space to the moon, Mars, and eventually worlds beyond.

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See fusion Thiel, Peter, 179 thrust, 38, 143, 185–86, 188, 191, 193, 194, 296–97, 344 dipole drive thrust, 205, 206 of fission reactor propulsion, 143 of fusion reactor propulsion, 160, 161, 168, 179 use of high thrust FRC rockets to depart Jupiter, 179 of Interplanetary Transport System (SpaceX), 108 and magnetic sails, 202, 203, 204 and Noah's Ark Eggs (seed spaceships), 210 and Nuclear Electric Propulsion systems, 343 and nuclear thermal rockets, 343 and specific impulse, 45, 344 Titan (moon of Saturn), 152, 260 commercial development of, 162–65, 168 terraforming of, 223 Titan-Saturn ferry, 163–64 Titius, Johann Daniel, 125 Tito, Dennis, 33 TLI (translunar injection), 107, 110, 111 TMI (Trans-Mars injection), 77, 344 Tokamak Energy, 175–76, 176 tokamaks, 84, 344 defined, 176–77 spherical tokamak, 175–76, 176 spherical tokamak (ST), 180 See also fusion, entrepreneurial fusion revolution Tombaugh, Clyde W., 152 Toutatis (near-Earth object), 129 Transcontinental Railroad, 97, 97 Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS telescope), 244, 251 “Translife” mission, 31 translunar injection orbit (TLI), 107, 109, 110, 111 Trans-Mars injection (TMI), 77, 344 transorbital railroad, 93–97 Tri-Alpha Energy (TAE), 177–78, 178 Triton (moon of Neptune), 152, 237 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 316 Tumlinson, Rick, 138, 332 Turner, Frederick Jackson on importance of having a frontier to conquer, 272–73 Twigg, Robert, 54 two-stage rocket systems, 39–45 payloads for one and two stage reusable rockets, 42 types of civilization.

pages: 388 words: 211,314

Frommer's Washington State
by Karl Samson
Published 2 Nov 2010

When, in 1859, a British pig rooting in an American soldier’s potato patch was shot and killed, the two nations came to the brink of war. It took international arbitration to settle the disagreement, which was finally resolved by turning San Juan Island over to U.S. control. Both the American Camp and the English Camp are preserved as part of the San Juan National Historic Park. In 1881, the first transcontinental railroad reached Spokane, in eastern Washington, and finally linked the Northwest with the eastern United States. In 1883, Tacoma became the end of the line for the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks that originated in St. Paul, Minnesota. With the arrival of the railroads, Washington took a great leap forward in its development.

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Nurtured on steady rains, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, western red cedar, and hemlock grew as much as 300 feet tall. Washington’s first sawmill began operation near present-day Vancouver, Washington, in 1828, and between the 1850s and 1870s, Washington sawmills supplied the growing California market as well as a limited foreign market. When the transcontinental railroads arrived in the 1880s, mills began shipping to the eastern states. In the early years, sawmills and logging companies would cut all the trees in one area and then move on to greener forests. By the turn of the 20th century the government had gained more control over public forests in an attempt to slow the cutting of the region’s trees, and sawmill owners began buying up huge tracts of land.

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George Vancouver in 1792, Port Townsend did not attract its first settlers until 1851. However, by the 1880s the town had become an important shipping port and was expected to grow into one of the most important cities on the West Coast. Port Townsend felt that it was the logical end of the line for the transcontinental railroad that was pushing westward in the 1880s, and based on the certainty of a railroad connection, real estate speculation and development boomed. Merchants and investors erected mercantile palaces along Water Street and elaborate Victorian homes on the bluff above the wharf district. However, the railroad never arrived.

pages: 848 words: 240,351

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
by David McCullough
Published 1 Jun 2001

“The same means of communication will unite the western coast of this continent to the eastern coast of Asia. New York will remain the center where these lines meet.” This, in other words, was to be something much more than a large bridge over an important river. It was to be one of history’s great connecting works, symbolic of the new age, like the Atlantic cable, the Suez Canal, and the transcontinental railroad. “Lo, Soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?” wrote Walt Whitman at about this time. “The earth be spann’d, connected by network…The lands welded together.” “The shapes arise!” wrote the Brooklyn poet. Singing my days, Singing the great achievements of the present Singing the strong, light works of engineers… But it was Roebling himself, never one to be overly modest, who had set forth the most emphatic claim for the bridge itself and the one that would be quoted most often in time to come: The completed work, when constructed in accordance with my designs, will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the greatest engineering work of the continent, and of the age.

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Man the killer, man the destroyer, would be man the builder for now—now and here, on the infinite, seemingly inexhaustible landscape of America. It was the time and place to be intensely, boldly constructive. In less than a month, when a much publicized golden spike would be driven with humorous difficulty at Promontory, Utah, the completion of the transcontinental railroad would be hailed as “one of the victories of peace.” In his way Slocum was saying the same thing. The real glory of American achievement lay ahead, as always. But the true heroes now would be those who made possible such victories of peace—the builders. One of the greatest of them, the architect Louis Sullivan, would later write of his own feelings as a boy at about this same time: “The chief engineers became his heroes; they loomed above other men…he dreamed to be a great engineer.

…

In the time he had spent on the bridge, the telephone and the electric light had been introduced. (What a difference they would have made during the work inside the caissons.) Now at night he could see hundreds of electric lights burning over in New York, directly across the river, in the blocks Edison had first lit the summer before, when Roebling was at Newport. Instead of one transcontinental railroad, there were now four and a fifth was under construction. There were ten million more people in the country than there had been in 1869. (Brooklyn had grown by 180,000; New York by more than 200,000.) The buffalo had been all but exterminated on the Great Plains and Chester A. Arthur had installed modern plumbing in the White House.

Lonely Planet Pocket San Francisco
by Lonely Planet and Alison Bing
Published 31 Aug 2012

Entry to the adjoining bookstore and frequent poetry readings are free. ( 1-800-537-6822 (1-800-KER-OUAC); www.thebeatmuseum.org; 540 Broadway; admission $5; 10am-7pm Tue-Sun; Columbus Ave) 4 Chinese Historical Society Museum Offline map Google map Picture what it was like to be Chinese in America during the Gold Rush, transcontinental railroad construction or the Beat heyday in this 1932 landmark, built as Chinatown’s YWCA by Julia Morgan (of Hearst Castle fame). Century-old photos, gold-mining tools and mesmerizing miniatures of Chinatown landmarks bring local history to life, alongside vintage advertisements and toys conveying Chinese stereotypes. ( 415-391-1188; www.chsa.org; 965 Clay St; adult/child $5/2, 1st Thu of month free; noon-5pm Tue-Fri, 11am-4pm Sat; Stockton St, California St; ) 5 Chinese Culture Center Art Gallery Offline map Google map You can see all the way to China inside this cultural center, which hosts exhibits of traditional Chinese arts, cutting-edge contemporary art installations and a new Art at Night series showcasing Chinese-inspired art, jazz, and food.

California
by Sara Benson
Published 15 Oct 2010

But when miners find gold and tax loopholes, SoCal ranchers are left carrying the tax burden, creating early north−south rivalries. 1851 The discovery of gold in Australia means cheering in the streets of Melbourne and panic in the streets of San Francisco, as the price for California gold plummets. May 10, 1869 The Golden Spike is nailed in place, completing the first transcontinental railroad linking California to the East Coast. The event is reported blow by blow using a new invention, the telegraph, in the world’s first real-time communication. 1882 The US Chinese Exclusion Act suspends new immigration from China, denies citizenship to those already in the country and sanctions racially targeted laws that stay on the books until 1943. 1906 A massive earthquake levels entire blocks of San Francisco in 47 seconds flat, setting off fires that rage for three days without adequate water supply or fire breaks.

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* * * Visual Arts Although the earliest European artists were trained cartographers accompanying Spanish explorers, their images of California as an island show more imagination than scientific rigor. This mythologizing tendency continued throughout the Gold Rush and through the 1880s, as Western artists alternated between caricatures of Wild West debauchery and manifest-destiny propaganda urging pioneers to settle the golden west. The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 brought an influx of romantic painters, who produced the classic California landscapes seen at the Oakland Museum and Long Beach Museum of Art. But with the invention of photography, the improbable truth of California’s landscape and its inhabitants was revealed. Pirkel Jones saw expressive potential in California landscape photography in the 19th century, and San Francisco native Ansel Adams’ sublime 1940s photographs finally did justice to Yosemite.

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On Sunday, the Old Town hosts a traffic-jamming flea market, complete with live music and food stands. Information Auburn Area Chamber of Commerce ( 530-885-5616; www.auburnchamber.net; 601 Lincoln Way; 9am-5pm Mon-Fri) Housed in the old Southern Pacific railroad depot at the north end of Lincoln Way, it has lots of useful local info. There’s a nearby monument to the first transcontinental railroad. California Welcome Center ( 530-887-2111; www.visitplacer.com; 13411 Lincoln Way; 9am-3pm) Right off I-80 at the Foresthill exit; there is oodles of information for those entering the state from the east. Sights & Activities Placer County Museum ( 530-889-6500; 101 Maple St; admission free; 11am-4pm Tue-Sun), on the 1st floor of the monumental 1898 Placer County Courthouse ( 8am-5pm), has Native American artifacts and displays of Auburn’s transportation heritage.

San Francisco
by Lonely Planet

Chinese Historical Society of America Museum Offline map Google map (CHSA; 415-391-1188; www.chsa.org; 965 Clay St; adult/child $5/2, 1st Thu of month free; noon-5pm Tue-Fri, 11am-4pm Sat; Stockton St; California St) Picture what it was like to be Chinese in America during the Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad construction or the Beat heyday at the nation’s largest Chinese American historical institute. Intimate vintage photos, an 1880 temple altar and Francis Wong’s mesmerizing miniatures of Chinatown landmarks are seen alongside the Daniel KE Ching collection of thousands of vintage advertisements, toys and postcards conveying Chinese stereotypes.

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San Francisco newspaper publisher and full-time big mouth Sam Brannan lets word out, and the Gold Rush is on. 1850 With hopes of solid-gold tax revenues, the US hastily dubs California the 31st state. 1849–51 San Francisco’s waterfront ‘Sydney-Town’ area becomes an increasing target of resentment and attacks; Australian boarding houses are torched six times by arsonists in two years. 1851 Gold discovery in Australia leads to cheering in the streets of Melbourne and panic in the streets of San Francisco as the price for California gold plummets. 1861–65 While US Civil War divides North from South back East, SF perversely profits in the West as industry diverted from factories burdened by the war effort heads to San Francisco. May 10, 1869 The Golden Spike completes the first transcontinental railroad. The news travels via San Franciscan David Brooks’ invention, the telegraph. 1873 When a nervous driver declines to test the brakes of Andrew Hallidie’s ‘wire rope railway,’ aka cable car, Hallidie jumps in and steers the car downhill as crowds cheer. 1882 The US Chinese Exclusion Act suspends new immigration from China.

Lonely Planet Panama (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet and Carolyn McCarthy
Published 30 Jun 2013

Although as much as 5% of the world’s total sea commerce traverses the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal in Egypt, which is capable of handling larger vessels, serves more than 6%. Furthermore, the Panama Canal is already operating at more than 90% of its maximum capacity and will reach its saturation point in less than five years. The biggest challenge the Panama Canal faces is luring the enormous post-Panamax vessels, which currently depend on either the US Transcontinental Railroad or the Suez Canal. But those in favor of the canal expansion are hoping that this lucrative market will adopt the Panama route, especially as trade volumes between Asia and the continental east coast increase. There is concern that the expansion will not offset its construction costs. Furthermore, critics from all sectors of society are pessimistic that the government can actually pull off the project at its stated price tag.

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It became a boom town attracting east-coast Americans who favored this ‘shortcut’ to California at the height of gold-rush fever. Even with boating the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and crossing the isthmus, it was considered a faster and less dangerous journey than crossing the US heartland and facing hostile indigenous groups. Following the completion of the US transcontinental railroad in 1869, Colón faded into obscurity less than 20 years after its founding. At the peak of Colón’s economic depression in 1881 the French arrived to build an inter-oceanic canal, but the city was burnt to the ground four years later by a Colombian hoping to spark a revolution. In the years to follow, the city blossomed, entirely rebuilt in French colonial architectural style.

pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

At its peak, the party had more than 100 congressmen and eight governors, but it was split apart by the issue of slavery.46 Racism was even more prevalent than anti-Catholicism (which may, in any case, have been motivated by dislike of the Irish and Italian immigrants who were arriving in large numbers after 1850). The use of Chinese workers to build the transcontinental railroad caused unrest among workers who feared that their wages were being undercut, and inspired much Sinophobia; a riot in Los Angeles in 1871 killed 17 to 20 Chinese residents. In the face of trade union pressure, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, preventing immigration of Chinese labourers.

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There was an enormous railroad boom after the end of the Civil War (the South’s relative lack of a network had weakened its campaign). The national system doubled in miles from 35,000 in 1865 to nearly 71,000 in 1873, and, during that period, the two coasts were symbolically linked when the Transcontinental Railroad met at Promontory Point in Utah. But as in Britain, the sponsors had overestimated demand. A financial panic in 1873 saw widespread bond defaults and by 1878, railroad share prices had fallen 60%.15 Synchronise your watches The railways affected more than just the way we travelled.

San Francisco
by Lonely Planet

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pages: 162 words: 61,105

Eyewitness Top 10 Los Angeles
by Catherine Gerber
Published 29 Mar 2010

ended in 1846–48, Los Angeles became part of the USA on April 4, ﬁve months before California became the 31st state. With a tiny population of about 1,600, this unruly and lawless backwater lacked even such basic urban infrastructures as graded roads and street lights. Few events have stimulated LA’s growth more than its connection to the transcontinental railroad. A small army of Chinese immigrants built the Southern Paciﬁc railroad from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The last spike – made of gold – was driven in ceremoniously on September 5. British immigrants David and William Horsely founded Hollywood’s ﬁrst permanent movie studio, the Nestor Film Company, in an old tavern at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street.

Frommer's San Diego 2011
by Mark Hiss
Published 2 Jan 2007

Where career-minded Angelenos have a reputation for wheeling and dealing and superficiality, San Diegans are a laid-back lot who seldom ask, “So, what do you do?” San Diego’s redheaded stepchild identity can trace its roots at least as far back as the 1880s, when the city’s sudden and dramatic boom hinged on its hope of becoming the West Coast terminus of the Santa Fe Railway’s transcontinental railroad. The city’s subsequent cataclysmic bust coincided with the Santa Fe’s decision to reroute its line through L.A., making San Diego the end of a spur line and squashing dreams of transforming the city’s promising port into the seat of commerce and industry in the Southland. Just as San Diego is defined, in part, by its northern neighbor, so, too, is it shaped by its sibling to the south.

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Old Town’s fate was sealed when it was swept by a devastating fire in 1872, followed 2 years later by a massive flood. San Diego’s population had already quadrupled (to about 2,300) by 1870, but that was nothing compared to the boom that was coming. Gold was discovered in the nearby Julian (p. 260) hills in 1870, and in 1873 construction began on an eastward transcontinental railroad line from San Diego. A stock market panic put the kibosh on that project, but by 1885 the first train from the east finally reached the city. 9 05_626214-ch02.indd 905_626214-ch02.indd 9 7/23/10 11:16 PM7/23/10 11:16 PM SAN DIEGO IN DEPTH Looking Back at San Diego 2 This touched off “the great boom,” as speculators realized the commercial potential of combining San Diego’s unparalleled port with the railroad’s ability to transport goods eastward.

pages: 510 words: 163,449

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
by Arthur Herman
Published 27 Nov 2001

Scots dominated the syndicate to promote its construction, from Donald Smith and his cousin George Stephen of the Bank of Montreal to London banker John Rose. Its principal engineer was also a Scot, Sandford Fleming. The building of the 3,700 mile Canadian Pacific was an epic achievement worthy of Thomas Telford. It defied obstacles and challenges as forbidding as anything the Americans faced with their transcontinental railroad. Fleming and his surveyors, engineers, and road crews had to lay track along nine hundred miles of bottomless muskeg, across the empty prairies of Manitoba and Alberta, and into the steep foothills of the Canadian Rockies. The place where Fleming decided to cross the Rockies was at Kicking Horse Pass.

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His father Alexander Melville Bell had developed a “visible speech system,” which he hoped would be the prototype of a universal phonetic alphabet. His son, in turn, invented a method for teaching the hearing-impaired to speak (Bell’s mother was deaf, as was his future wife), before the family emigrated to Canada in 1870. In 1865, as telegraph wires connected the American continent from California to the east coast, and the transcontinental railroad was nearing completion, the eighteen-year-old Alex had conceived the possibility of the electrical transmission of actual human speech, not just dots and dashes on a keyed device. In the summer of 1874 he laid out his theory to his father at their house in Brantford, Ontario. “If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity precisely as the air varies in intensity during the production of sound,” he concluded, “I should be able to transmit speech telegraphically.”

The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz
Published 15 Feb 2011

Certainly neither World War I nor the Iraq conflict was "caused" by technology in any direct Level III Technology 77 sense, but confusion about technological complexity may have made them more probable. It was not only in the military sense that railroads changed the course of empire. They also fundamentally altered economic and power structures, and, more subtly, cultural authority. In the United States, for example, railroads-especially the completion of the transcontinental railroad-helped validate the continental scale of the American state, and restructured the economy from local or at best regional business concentrations to trusts and monopolies by creating the potential for national-scale markets. On the global scale, railroads enabled the connection of hinterlands with ports that were themselves changing with the growth of steamship capability.

pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 28 Sep 2014

The British had dealt with this problem by standardizing the entire country on Greenwich Mean Time in the late 1840s, synchronizing railroad clocks by telegraph. (To this day, clocks in every air traffic control center and cockpit around the world report Greenwich time; GMT is the single time zone of the sky.) But the United States was too sprawling to run off of one clock, particularly after the transcontinental railroad opened in 1869. With eight thousand towns across the country, each on its own clock, and over a hundred thousand miles of railroad track connecting them, the need for some kind of standardized system became overwhelming. For several decades, various proposals circulated for standardizing U.S. time, but nothing solidified.

pages: 233 words: 64,479

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife
by Marc Freedman
Published 15 Dec 2011

In Nora Ephron’s words, “There’s a moment when people know—whatever their skills are at denial—that they have passed from what they can delude themselves into thinking is middle age to something that you could call the third act.” Ephron, now sixty-nine, declares, “I’m definitely in the third act.” As the “third act” notion suggests, the reality is that the end of middle age is no longer, for most people, attached to the beginning of either retirement or old age. (It’s like the transcontinental railroad, started at both ends, designed to eventually meet. However, the two ends of this project—life—don’t meet anymore.) Individuals left in that lurch, in this unstable space that has no name, no clear beginning or end, no rites or routes of passage, face a contradictory culture, incoherent policies, institutions tailored for a different population, and a society that seems in denial that this period even exists.

pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs
by Andy Kessler
Published 1 Feb 2011

At some point Rockefeller stopped being a Free Radical and instead became a ruthless businessman, or more likely criminal, blowing up his competitors’ oil pipelines so he could control distribution. But you can’t take away the benefit of ever-cheaper light and heat that he and others brought to millions. HERE’S ANOTHER ONE. After the Civil War, demand for railroads boomed. The Golden Spike creating the first transcontinental railroad was hammered at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869 by Leland Stanford. But the pricing and economic part of this story are rarely discussed, which is why history teachers usually don’t teach math. The rails, obviously, are the key component of any railroad. Originally, metallurgists melted iron ore by mixing it with burning wood (charcoal), and then poured it into a mold to get cast iron.

pages: 212 words: 69,846

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World
by Rahm Emanuel
Published 25 Feb 2020

The preamble of the Confederate Constitution begins with the phrase “We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character…” The document also contains several provisions that grant some of the federal power found in the U.S. Constitution back to the states. The outcome of the Civil War put an end to the dominance of states in the U.S. government system. Through some fits and starts, federal influence began to grow from that point on. The first two projects beyond Reconstruction after the Civil War, transcontinental railroad development and the land grant college system, illustrate the point. * * * The great nation-state of the United States of America begins with the country’s response to the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal remains one of our nation’s greatest achievements, a shining example of how the federal government can work on behalf of its citizens and benefit them in a progressive manner.

pages: 877 words: 182,093

Wealth, Poverty and Politics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 31 Aug 2015

In 1830, for example, it cost more than 30 dollars to move a ton of cargo 300 miles on land but only 10 dollars to ship it 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.2 One consequence of such huge transportation cost differentials was that people living in the city of Tiflis in the Caucasus, 340 miles from the Baku oil fields by land, bought oil imported from the United States, 8,000 miles away by water.3 Similarly in mid-nineteenth century America, before the transcontinental railroad was built, San Francisco could be reached both faster and cheaper across the Pacific Ocean from a port in China than it could be reached over land from the banks of the Missouri River.4 Given the vast amounts of food, fuel and other necessities of life that must be transported into cities, and the vast amounts of a city’s output that must be transported out to sell, there is no mystery why so many cities around the world have been located on navigable waterways, especially before the transportation revolutions within the past 200 years that produced motorized transport on land.

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Although there were substantial numbers of Chinese immigrants in the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century, as late as 1940 fewer than 2 percent of Chinese American males had completed college.34 The earliest generations of Chinese in nineteenth century America worked as manual laborers, whether on farms or in cities or as workers helping build the transcontinental railroad.35 Chinese men— there were very few women— lived poverty-stricken lives, often sleeping ten or twelve to a room.36 By the 1920s, the primary occupation of Chinese Americans was in laundries, usually small, one-man, hand laundries.37 In the twenty-first century, as we have seen, immigrants from Fujian province in China began working as hotel maids, restaurant laborers and in other similar low-level, low-paid jobs, often with long hours of exhausting work, while having their children tutored to be able to get into New York’s elite public high schools, from which they could go on to elite colleges.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
by Daniel Immerwahr
Published 19 Feb 2019

Suddenly Indian Country was no longer pressed up against the nation’s western border. It stood exposed in the middle, right between the bustling East and the burgeoning West. Where gold had just been discovered. “The Indian barrier must be removed,” demanded Senator Stephen Douglas, who longed to run a transcontinental railroad through Indian Country to California. William Henry Seward noted that eighteen tribes lived on the land that Douglas wanted. “Where will they go?” Seward asked. “Back across the Mississippi?… To the Himalayas?” Who cared? Eager white settlers streamed in, and Congress obliged by carving Kansas and Nebraska out of the heart of Indian Country—two new territories open to white settlement.

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Manuel Tisquantum, see Squanto Tlingit Tokyo Tomahawk missiles Tom Sawyer (Twain) Tonkin Gulf Resolution Toots and the Maytals Tora Bora (Afghanistan) Torresola, Doris Torresola, Griselio torture Tosh, Peter Toshiba Total Quality Management movement Totsuko (Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo), see Sony Toyota traffic lights and signs, standardization of Trail of Tears transcontinental railroad transistor radios Treasure Island (Stevenson) Treasury, U.S. Department of the Trinidad Truman, Harry; assassination attempt on; Philippine independence approved by; protests against postwar military policy of Trump, Donald Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands tuberculosis Tugwell, Rexford Tunisia Tunner, Gen.

pages: 206 words: 9,776

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2012

This activity is clearly speculative in the long term, and always runs the risk of replicating, at a much later date and on a magnified scale, the very overaccumulation conditions that it initially helps to relieve. Hence the crisis-prone character of urban and other forms of p hysical infrastructural investments (transcontinental railroads and highways, dams, and the like) . The cyclical character of such investments has been well documented for the nineteenth century in the meticulous work of Brinley Th omas (see Figure 3 ).20 But the theory of construction business cycles became neglected after 1 945 or so, in part because state-led Keynesian-style interventions were deemed effective in flattening them out.

pages: 253 words: 79,441

Better Than Fiction
by Lonely Planet

We were young(ish) and indulging in the romance of the great American road trip, as popularized in books and movies and, in a sense, reaching back to before there even were roads to take such trips on. We crossed the Mississippi in the shadow of the St Louis Arch, monument to the city’s role as gateway to the West, stopped outside Salt Lake City at Promontory Summit where the tracks of the first transcontinental railroad were joined, and paused near journey’s end at an Oregon Trail museum, where the original wagon ruts of the pioneers could still be seen worn deep into the rocky ground. This wasn’t my history – I’m an expat Brit – but I was at least as thrilled as my American wife to see these famous sights (and several lesser ones).

USA Travel Guide
by Lonely, Planet

Mummers Museum MUSEUM ( 215-336-3050; www.mummersmuseum.com; 1100 S 2nd St; adult/child $3.50/2.50; 9:30am-4:30pm Wed, Fri & Sat, to 9:30pm Thu) Celebrating the tradition of disguise and masquerade. It has an integral role in the famed Mummers Parade, which takes place here every New Year’s Day. CHINATOWN & AROUND The fourth-largest Chinatown in the USA, Philly’s version has existed since the 1860s. Chinese immigrants who built America’s transcontinental railroads started out west and worked their way here. Today’s Chinatown remains a center for immigrants, though now many of the neighborhood’s residents come from Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam in addition to every province in China. Though it does hold a few residents, the tone of Chinatown is thoroughly commercial.

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Union Pacific Railroad Museum MUSEUM (www.uprr.com; 200 Pearl St, Council Bluffs, IA; admission by donation; 10am-4pm Tue-Sat) Just across the river in the cute little downtown area of Council Bluffs, Iowa; this grand museum tells the story of the world’s most profitable railroad, the company that rammed the transcontinental railroad west from here in the 1860s. Look for the pictures of Ronald Reagan and his chimp-pal Bonzo aboard a train. Sleeping There is a good mix of midrange and budget hotels along US 275 near 60th St, at I-80 exits 445 and 449 and across the river in Council Bluffs, IA, at I-29 exit 51. Old Market has several midrange chains.

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Meriwether Lewis and William Clark claimed their enduring fame after the USA bought almost all of present-day Montana, Wyoming and eastern Colorado in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The two explorers set out to survey the land, covering 8000 miles in three years. Their success urged on other adventurers, and soon the migration was in motion. Wagon trains voyaged to the mountainous lands right into the 20th century, only temporarily slowed by the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad across southern Wyoming in the late 1860s. To accommodate settlers, the US purged the western frontier of the Spanish, British and, in a truly shameful era, most of the Native American population. The government signed endless treaties to defuse Native American objections to increasing settlement, but always reneged and shunted tribes onto smaller reservations.

pages: 769 words: 397,677

Frommer's California 2007
by Harry Basch , Mark Hiss , Erika Lenkert and Matthew Richard Poole
Published 6 Dec 2006

Mon–Thurs 5:30–9:30pm; Fri 5:30–10pm; Sat 5–10pm; Sun 5–9pm. 2 Oakland 10 miles E of San Francisco Although it’s just 10 miles from San Francisco, Oakland is worlds apart from its sister city. Originally a cluster of ranches and farms, its size and stature exploded practically overnight in 1869, as the last mile of transcontinental railroad track was laid. Major shipping traffic soon followed, and to this day Oakland is one of the busiest industrial ports on the West Coast. The price for all this success, however, has been Oakland’s reputation as a workingclass city famous for its crime and forever in the shadow of its chic neighbor to the west.

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Although the area has cobblestone streets, wooden sidewalks, and authentic Gold Rush–era architecture, the high concentration of T-shirt shops and other gimmicky stores has turned it into a sort of historical amusement park. Nonetheless, there are interesting things to see, such as where the Pony Express ended and the transcontinental railroad—and the Republican Party—began. The California State Railroad Museum (see below) is loved by railroad buffs, and the Sacramento 5 5th St. 2nd St. ROOSEVELT PARK Mall 10 CAPITOL PARK Archives Plaza DINING Biba 18 Esquire Grill 6 Fox & Goose Public House 12 Mulvaney’s B&L Restaurant 14 Paragary’s Bar and Oven 19 33rd Street Bistro 20 80 The Waterboy 15 12 6 9 8 i Governor’s Mansion 11 California State Capitol estrian Mall CESAR CHAVEZ PLAZA 7 12th St.

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You won’t miss much if you bypass the memorabilia displays and head straight for the museum’s 105 shiny locomotives and rail cars, beautiful antiques that are true works of art. Afterward, you can watch a 20-minute film on the history of the western railroads that’s quite good, then peruse related exhibits that tell the amazing story of the building of the transcontinental railroad. This museum is not just for train buffs: Over half a million people visit each year, and even the hordes of schoolchildren that typically mob this place shouldn’t dissuade you from visiting one of the largest and best railroad museums in the country. Allow about 2 hours to see it all. From April to September, on weekends and holidays from 11am to 5pm, steam locomotive rides carry passengers 6 miles along the Sacramento River.

Parks Directory of the United States
by Darren L. Smith and Kay Gill
Published 1 Jan 2004

History: Designated as a national historic site in nonfederal ownership on April 2, 1957; authorized for federal ownership and administration by act of Congress on July 30, 1965. Location: 32 miles west of Brigham City, Utah, via UT 13 and 83. Facilities: Picnic area, visitor center (u), museum/exhibit, self-guided tour/trail. Entrance fee required. Activities: Interpretive and living history programs, auto touring. Special Features: Completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States was celebrated here where the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads met on May 10, 1869, joining 1,776 miles of rail. ★154★ GLEN CANYON NATIONAL RECREATION AREA PO Box 1507 691 Scenic View Dr Page, AZ 86040 Web: www.nps.gov/glca/ Phone: 928-608-6200; Fax: 928-608-6259 Size: 1,254,429 acres.

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Activities: Guided tours, excursion train rides (seasonal). Special Features: Museum interprets the role of the ‘‘iron horse’’ in connecting California to the rest of the nation. Housed in one large building are more than 21 fully-restored historic locomotives and cars. A full-scale diorama depicts the building of a section of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. A block from the museum is a reconstructed passenger station and freight depot circa 1867. During the summer, a steam train takes visitors from the depot to Miller Park and back along the Sacramento River. ★1546★ CANDLESTICK POINT STATE RECREATION AREA c/o Diablo Vista District Office 845 Casa Grande Rd Petaluma, CA 94954 Web: www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?

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Special Features: Park is part of the Old Sacramento Historic District, all of which has been designated a National Historic Landmark. The park includes original and reconstructed Gold Rush-era buildings, displays, shops, and the California State Railroad Museum. Among the historic structures is the Big Four Building, where much of the transcontinental railroad was planned, and the BF Hastings Building, which was the western terminus of the Pony Express. ★1677★ PACIFICA STATE BEACH c/o Santa Cruz District Office 303 Big Trees Park Rd Felton, CA 95018 Web: www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=524 Phone: 650-738-7381 Size: 20.7 acres. Location: Off Highway 1 in downtown Pacifica.

pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover
by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and William Greider
Published 9 Jan 2009

Thus, in the nineteenth century the government subsidized canals and the mer-chant marine. In the decades before and during the Civil War, the government gave away some 100 million acres of land to the railroads, along with considerable loans to keep the railroad interests in business. The 10,000 Chinese and 3,000 Irish who worked on the transcontinental railroad got no free land and no loans, only long hours, little pay, accidents and sickness. The principle of government helping big business and refusing government largesse to the poor was bipartisan, upheld by Republicans and Democrats. President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, vetoed a bill to give $10,000 to Texas farmers to help them buy seed grain during a drought, saying, “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.”

pages: 306 words: 79,537

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)
by Tim Marshall
Published 10 Oct 2016

At the time it was known as “Seward’s Folly,” named for the secretary of state, William Seward, who agreed to the deal. He paid $7.2 million, or two cents, an acre. The press accused him of purchasing snow, but minds were changed with the discovery of gold in 1896. Decades later, huge reserves of oil were also found. Two years on, in 1869, came the opening of the transcontinental railroad. Now you could cross the country in a week, whereas it had previously taken several hazardous months. As the country grew, and grew wealthy, it began to develop a blue-water navy. For most of the nineteenth century, foreign policy was dominated by expanding trade and avoiding entanglements outside the neighborhood, but it was time to push out and protect the approaches to the coastlines.

pages: 291 words: 85,822

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit
by Aja Raden
Published 10 May 2021

In the late nineteenth century, around the same time a huge wave of Irish immigrants flooded onto the eastern shore of America, another giant wave of immigrants, this one from China, was pouring into the West and would quite literally meet them in the middle. Between 1849 and 1882 over 180,000 indentured Chinese laborers, mostly from farms and poorer villages in the south, came to America to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. Indentured servants, they were signed to contracts of up to five years and paid almost nothing. They couldn’t bring much with them from home, but they couldn’t buy much once they got here, either. And among the necessary items most frequently imported to American shores were various traditional medicines, including the now infamous snake oil.

pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

Chrystia Freeland, “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” Atlantic, January/February 2011; Paul Toscano, “Obama Wins 8 of 10 Wealthiest Counties in U.S.,” CNBC, November 8, 2012; Callahan, Fortunes of Change, pp. 39, 170. 37. Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, pp. 302–3; “The Transcontinental Railroad: The Credit Mobilier Scandal,” American Experience (PBS), PBS.com, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/tcrr-scandal; “Election Central: The Progressives and Direct Democracy,” Constitutional Rights Foundation, http://www.crf-usa.org/election-central/the-progressives.html. 38.

pages: 246 words: 82,965

The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000-Mile Horseback Journey Into the Old West
by Will Grant
Published 14 Oct 2023

For much of the time, the old trace of the Pony Express Trail was visible beside the modern dirt road, and somehow over the past 150 years, evidence of the nineteenth-century travelers remained. I found old rusted horseshoes and mule shoes and shoes made for the cloven hooves of oxen. The shoes were left by not only those associated with the Pony Express, but also the ox- and mule-team freighters that traveled the same route until the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, some one hundred miles north of the Pony Express Trail. The road gets so little traffic today that the shoes were lying on top of the sand as though no one had been through there in a century and a half. The ox shoes were shaped like commas. Each foot had two shoes on it so that each ox wore eight shoes.

Southwest USA Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Virginia City Site of the Comstock Lode, which begat an 1859 silver rush (Click here). Picacho Peak State Park On April 15, 1862 this desolate place witnessed the westernmost battle of the Civil War (Click here). Golden Spike National Historic Site Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad met here on May 10, 1869, completing the transcontinental railroad (Click here). Water Adventures Water adventures? In a land of deserts, red rocks and cacti? Thank the big dams like Hoover, Glen Canyon and Parker for the region’s big lakes and all their splashy activities. Elsewhere, hurtle over whitewater, paddle over ripples, slide through a plastic tube or simply sip a cocktail beside a Sin City pool – there’s something here to fit your speed.

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Next to the visitor center, a simple cafe stays open from May through October. The nearby village of Baker has a gas station, a basic restaurant and sparse accommodations. Along I-80 I-80 is the old fur trappers’ route, following the Humboldt River from northeast Nevada to Lovelock, near Reno. It’s also one of the earliest emigrant trails to California. Transcontinental railroad tracks reached Reno in 1868 and crossed the state within a year. By the 1920s, the Victory Hwy traveled the same route, which later became the interstate. Although not always the most direct route across Nevada, I-80 skirts many of the Great Basin’s steep mountain ranges. Overnight stops in the Basque-flavored country around Elko or Winnemucca will give you a true taste of cowboy life.

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Rules No pets are allowed at resorts and four-night minimum stays may be required December through March. Ski Utah (800-754-8724; www.skiutah.com) Puts out excellent annual winter vacation guides – in paper and online. THE REMOTE NORTHWEST On May 10, 1869, the westward Union Pacific Railroad and eastward Central Pacific Railroad met at Promontory Summit. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the face of the American West changed forever. Golden Spike National Historic Site (www.nps.gov/gosp; per vehicle $7; 9am-5pm), 32 miles northwest of Brigham City on Hwy 83, has an interesting museum and films, auto tours and several interpretive trails. Steam-engine demonstrations take place June through August.

pages: 1,335 words: 336,772

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1990

Between Kansas and the Rocky Mountains, schoolboy maps showed a blank space dubbed the great American desert.2 Europeans relied on their American agents to guide them through this financial wilderness, and American bankers had to keep posted on developments. Soon after completion of the first transcontinental railroad, in May 1869, Pierpont and Fanny Morgan made an extended rail journey across the country, stopping to see Mormon leader Brigham Young in Utah. A competition was already underway on Wall Street between Jewish bankers, such as Joseph Seligman, who wooed German investors with railroad shares, and Yankee bankers, such as Pierpont Morgan, who drew on London money.

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“And it will be much easier for them to obtain the second half than it was the first,” said one newspaper editor, foreseeing a subsequent eastern rail monopoly. “One railroad after another will slide gently into their grasp until any passenger anywhere who objects to traveling on their lines can take a trolley car or walk.”69 The dreams of the architects of Northern Securities went beyond the most vivid Populist fear. After tying up transcontinental railroads, they planned to link them with steamship lines to Asia—a vision that later would culminate in Edward Harriman’s plans for an around-the-world transportation network. Pierpont, meanwhile, meditated on a rail-ship monopoly of the North Atlantic, extending his domain beyond the borders of the United States.

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Through a syndicate managed by Morgan Stanley, his estate sold off his twenty-five-thousand-share block of J. P. Morgan stock. It was the largest block in existence, with an estimated market value of nearly $6 million. Lamont was a man of prodigious gifts, the real J. P. Morgan behind J. P. Morgan and Company. Had he lived in Pierpont’s day, he might have summoned steel mills or transcontinental railroads into being. Instead, as a man of the Diplomatic Age, he was the architect of huge state loans in the 1920s. As they defaulted in the 1930s, he had to devote his time to fruitless salvage operations, and his gifts were squandered in the general wreckage. For all his power, he seems in retrospect a tiny figure bobbing atop a gigantic tidal wave.

pages: 252 words: 80,636

Bureaucracy
by David Graeber
Published 3 Feb 2015

Even much later, after actual cogs had been invented, the design of complex machinery was always to some degree an elaboration of principles originally developed to organize people.113 Yet still, again and again, we see those machines—whether their moving parts are arms and torsos or pistons, wheels, and springs—being put to work to realize otherwise impossible fantasies: cathedrals, moon shots, transcontinental railways, and on and on. Certainly, poetic technologies almost invariably have something terrible about them; the poetry is likely to evoke dark satanic mills as much as it does grace or liberation. But the rational, bureaucratic techniques are always in service to some fantastic end. From this perspective, all those mad Soviet plans—even if never realized—marked the high-water mark of such poetic technologies.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist
Published 24 Oct 2016

In the meantime, almost by happenstance, southern politicians lined up behind a different strategy, one based on Calhoun’s substantive-due-process insistence that slavery should be legal in all US territories. Their choice determined Ben Slaughter’s fate, and Richard’s as well. BY 1853, WHEN FRANKLIN Pierce took office as the fourteenth president, South Carolina native James Gadsden had been promoting the idea of a transcontinental railroad from New Orleans to Los Angeles for five years. This line would spread slaveholding along its path, Gadsden hoped, for he believed that “Negro slavery, under educated and Intelligent masters,” has always “been the Pioneers and basis of the civilization of Savage countries,” and also that “without an enduring & well regulated labor the agriculture of the Pacific will never be developed.”

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Always, the proslavery forces had made the rest of the United States choose between profitable expansion of the slave country or economic slowdown. Between slavery and disunion. Between supporting a party turned into a colonized host for viral proslavery dogma, or defeat in national elections. Between bills for expanding slavery into Kansas, or passing up the opportunity to build a transcontinental railroad. John Brown and his band of futile revolutionaries signaled that the game was changing. The clarity of Lincoln’s arguments had also raised the warning, but he at least had lost in 1858, and perhaps northerners would once more flinch from containing the expansion of slavery in 1860. But somehow, in losing, Dangerfield Newby, Shields Green, John Copeland, and John Brown had won.

pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Published 6 May 2007

For example, in the nineteenth-century American West, Chinese immigrants were hired to work in the gold mines, potentially taking jobs from white laborers. The white-run newspapers fomented prejudice against them, describing the Chinese as "depraved and vicious," "gross gluttons," "bloodthirsty and inhuman." Yet only a decade later, when the Chinese were willing to accept the dangerous, arduous work of building the transcontinental railroad—work that white laborers were unwilling to undertake—public prejudice toward them subsided, replaced by the opinion that the Chinese were sober, industrious, and law-abiding. "They are equal to the best white men," said the railroad tycoon Charles Crocker. "They are very trusty, very intelligent and they live up to their contracts."

pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution
by Henry Schlesinger
Published 16 Mar 2010

The near instant communication of telegraphs only made the problem more confusing. Bankers in New York consulted schedules for banks in Pittsburgh while corporate headquarters for large railroads grew awash in time schedules as their lines expanded westward. One of the most dramatic illustrations on record occurred when the two ends of the transcontinental railroad were joined at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. Leland Stanford, cofounder of the Central Pacific Railroad, was supposed to pound in the last spike, which was wired to send a telegraph signal to both coasts. At the very least, it was a neat publicity trick. However, Stanford missed the spike, and a nearby telegraph operator keyed in a single word “Done.”

pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
by Kevin Carey
Published 3 Mar 2015

The universities created in the Morrill spirit would eventually become some of the nation’s largest and most productive institutions of higher learning. Some of their leaders were openly disdainful of the older colleges. In California, the robber baron Leland Stanford used a fortune made building the transcontinental railroad with exploited Chinese workers to found a university in the memory of his dead son. David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford, declared that colleges should not prepare students “for a holiness class which is rendered unclean by material concerns.” At the University of Nebraska, the chancellor had little use for “institutions that seem to love scholarship and erudition for their own sakes; who make these ends and not means; who hug themselves with joy because they are not as other men, and especially are not as this practical fellow.”

The Big Oyster
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 20 Dec 2006

The New Yorkers were not accustomed to such stringent consumer protection and the American agent argued that the oysters had spent a little time in the Great South Bay and they had thought that this was all that was required to label them Bluepoints. That the Americans don’t know any better is always an argument of some currency in England, and the charges were dropped. New York’s oyster markets were also supplying the nation. After the rail link was established from Atlantic to Pacific, the transcontinental railroad, a project passed by Congress during the war but not completed until 1869, New York had the continent for a market. This was true not only for all the goods brought into New York’s port from Europe and other points in the world, but also for local oysters. Every Christmas, thousands of barrels of oysters labeled Saddle Rock or Bluepoint, the best marketing names, were shipped to Denver, San Francisco, and other Western cities.

pages: 293 words: 90,714

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism
by Mikael Colville-Andersen
Published 28 Mar 2018

It snowed again the next night and there I was, like a puppy dog in the window, watching the desire lines form in exactly the same places. A modern city would take note and plan accordingly based on these lines. Another example is in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal. There has been a railway here since 1876, part of the transcontinental railway that united Canada. Nowadays, there are densely populated neighborhoods on both sides of the tracks. The Canadian Pacific Railway has been reluctant to hear the calls from the citizens and the Borough of Le Plateau for level crossings. They are content with people having to make massive detours to get across the divide.

pages: 756 words: 228,797

Ayn Rand and the World She Made
by Anne C. Heller
Published 27 Oct 2009

As an expression of hopelessness, people ask one another, with a shrug, “Who is John Galt?” Where the question came from and what it means are a matter of indifference to those who ask it. Amid the impending crisis, the novel’s high-spirited heroine, Dagny Taggart, strives to save her family’s great ancestral railroad, the New York—based Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. She is the vice-president of operations; her peevish, whining older brother James Taggart is nominally the president. While Dagny tries to keep thousands of miles of railroad track repaired with pieces of scrap metal and stretches the capacity of years-old diesel engines, James ingratiates himself with a clique of high-powered Washington officials, who bestow favors in return.

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Edgar Hoover, who turned her down. What she wanted from him is not known. En route to California, she and O’Connor stopped for a few days in New York, where she focused on collecting background material for the railroad scenes in Atlas Shrugged. She toured Grand Central Terminal (the inspiration for the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad Terminal) and interviewed half a dozen executives of the New York Central Railroad, including the male vice-president in charge of operations, the real-life equivalent of Dagny Taggart. She showed Archibald Ogden the first six chapters of the novel and met with editors of Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, and Life, presumably about assignments.

pages: 325 words: 99,983

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

In world affairs, the United States was a remote, apparently unimportant, spectator; and in British consciousness, America was also distant. Not until 1912 did Whitaker’s Almanack place its data on the United States ahead of information about ‘Foreign Countries’. Economically speaking, however, America was becoming the dominant partner. Between 1860 and 1914, thanks to the completion of the great transcontinental railroads, America’s imports had increased fivefold, and its exports sevenfold, and the New York Stock Exchange was booming. Moreover, there was a reckoning on the horizon. In the making of the world’s English, it is impossible to overestimate the consequences of the four years that were about to unfold in the fields of France, a truly international conflict, the First World War. 3 When war broke out in the summer of 1914 the common language and culture of Europe was either German, or French.

Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It)
by William Poundstone
Published 5 Feb 2008

Harold Hotelling, a statistician in the economics department, was able to offer Arrow a fellowship on the condition that he switch his major to economics. Hotelling's interests were diverse. In 1929 he proposed a famous riddle of economics, one that is equally important to political theory. There are two "places of business" located "along a line ... which may be Main Street in a town or a transcontinental railroad," Hotelling wrote. Or, as it's often explained today, the places of business are two ice-cream stands on a crowded summer beach. Where should each stand be located in order to get the most business? The beach is, say, a thousand yards long, running left to right. The only difference between one stand and the other is location.

pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia Chapter 6 Utopia Reconsidered The Growing Retreat from Space Exploration and Other Megaprojects Nothing is more indicative of the fading of scientiﬁc and technological utopian fantasies from the sensibilities of ordinary Americans (and most other people) than the relatively muted response on the twenty-ﬁfth anniversary of the ﬁrst moon landing of 1969. In 1994 there was hardly the euphoria that had characterized similar major anniversary celebrations involving New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge, the completion of the ﬁrst transcontinental railroad at Promontory, Utah, the ﬁrst coast-to-coast telephone hookup, or the ﬁrst Ford Motor Model T automobile (though the 2007 Model T centennial was severely reduced from original plans because of the threat of bankruptcy facing Ford Motor Company and, for that matter, the possible collapse of the entire American auto industry).

pages: 353 words: 97,029

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration
by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Published 16 Feb 2023

Damning the Narmada: India’s Greatest Planned Environmental Disaster. Penang: Third World Network and Asia-Pacific People’s Environment Network, APPEN. Amazon. 2022. “Leadership Principles.” https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles. Ambrose, Stephen E. 2000. Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869. New York: Touchstone. Anderson, Cameron, and Adam D. Galinsky. 2006. “Power, Optimism, and Risk-Taking.” European Journal of Social Psychology 36 (4): 511–36. Andranovich, Greg, Matthew J. Burbank, and Charles H. Heying. 2001. “Olympic Cities: Lessons Learned from Mega-Event Politics.”

pages: 941 words: 237,152

USA's Best Trips
by Sara Benson
Published 23 May 2010

Do Canyon View Information Plaza The primary visitors center and South Rim’s transportation hub. bookstore 928-638-7145, visitors center 928-638-7644; Grand Canyon Village, South Rim; 8am-7pm, with seasonal variations; Grand Canyon National Park Admission includes North and South Rims, most of the interior canyon and remote Toroweap/Tuweep Overlook. 928-638-7888; www.nps.gov/grca; 7-day pass individual/vehicle $12/25; South Rim year-round, North Rim mid-May–mid-Oct; Museum of Northern Arizona Excellent overview of regional culture, history and geology. 928-774-5213; www.musnaz.org; 3101 N Fort Valley Rd, Flagstaff; adult/child/under 7yr $7/4/free; 9am-5pm; Sunset Crater Volcano and Wupatki National Monuments Ancient puebloan site within miles of AD 1040 eruption. 928-526-0502, 928-679-2365; www.nps.gov/sucr, www.nps.gov/wupa; 6400 N Hwy 89; 7-day pass adult/under 16yr $5/free; 9am-5pm; Eat Arizona Room Antler chandeliers and picture windows. 928-638-2631; Grand Canyon Village, South Rim; mains $7-15; 11am-3pm, 4:30-10pm, with seasonal variations; Cameron Trading Post Eating, shopping, handsome accommodations and a garden courtyard. 928-679-2231; 466 Hwy 89; mains $8-13 6am-10pm May-Aug, 7am-9pm Sep-Apr; Jacob Lake Inn Just about everyone stumbles out of their car to stretch their cramped bodies. 928-643-7232; Hwy 67, Jacob Lake; mains $6-15; 6:30am-9pm; SLEEP Bright Angel Lodge & Cabins Simple historic lodge rooms and rim-side cabins. reservations up to 13 months in advance 888-297-2757, same-day 928-638-2631; www.grandcanyonlodge.com; Grand Canyon Village, South Rim; r $79-90, cabins $111-159, ste $138-333; El Tovar Coveted suites with spacious patios and views. reservations up to 13 months in advance 888-297-2757, same-day 928-638-2631; www.grandcanyonlodges.com; Grand Canyon Village, South Rim; r $174-268, ste $321-426; Grand Canyon Lodge Western cabins feature gas fireplaces and porches; four rim-side jewels boast full-canyon views. reservations up to 12 months in advance 877-386-4383, same-day 928-638-2611; www.grandcanyonforever.com; North Rim; r $112, cabins $116-170; mid-May–mid-Oct: Little America Hotel Luxury accommodation behind a roadside motel veneer. 928-779-2741; www.littleamerica.com/flagstaff; 2515 E Butler Ave, Flagstaff; r $90-180, ste $200-350; USEFUL WEBSITES www.kaibab.org www.flagstaffarizona.org * * * * * * LINK YOUR TRIP www.lonelyplanet.com/trip-planner TRIP 1 Route 66: Motoring the Mother Road 76 Southwest by Train 79 Written in Stone: Utah’s National Parks * * * Return to beginning of chapter TRIP 76 Southwest by Train * * * WHY GO Stare out your window at the plaintive desert of New Mexico and Arizona, stroll downtown Santa Fe and Flagstaff, bed down in historic hotels, and choo-choo up to the canyon on a vintage train. In an age of rising fuel costs and city sprawl, riding the rails can be easy and economical. * * * Following the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, travelers rode steam trains to the Wild West. Stories of Kit Carson, photographs by Edward Curtis and paintings by Thomas Moran fueled the imagination, and Americans eagerly voyaged across the country to see the mountains and the canyons. They were, after all, young America’s cathedrals, billed as grander than the Swiss Alps and more stunning than the Sistine Chapel.

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Look for the 2nd-floor porch. 928-779-1919; www.weatherfordhotel.com; 23 N Leroux St, Flagstaff, AZ; r $60-175; USEFUL WEBSITES www.flagstaffarizona.org www.santafe.org SUGGESTED READS • Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art, Kathleen Howard • Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Build the Transcontinental Railroad 1863–1869, Stephen Ambrose LINK YOUR TRIP TRIP 1 Route 66: Motoring the Mother Road 75 Week in the Grand Canyon 77 Santa Fe Arts Amble * * * Return to beginning of chapter TRIP 77 Santa Fe Arts Amble * * * WHY GO It’s not just carved howling coyotes and neon desert landscapes at this high-country hot spot of American art.

Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area
by Nick Edwards and Mark Ellwood
Published 2 Jan 2009

As it grows, its diversity increases, adding Taiwanese,Vietnamese, Korean,Thai, and Laotian families, with the cultural fusion most evident in its grocery markets, where alongside traditional Chinese produce, you’ll find Italian basil, Mexican kohlrabi bulbs, and uniquely Southeast Asian fruits like the pungent durian. The neighborhood has its roots in the mostly Cantonese laborers who migrated to the area after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, as well as the arrival of Chinese sailors keen to benefit from the Gold Rush. The city didn’t extend much of a welcome to Chinese immigrants, however, and they were met by a tide of vicious racial attacks. Shockingly, such attacks were 63 Down town San F ranc i s c o | Chinatown 64 officially ratified under the unapologetically racist 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the only law ever in America aimed at a single ethnic group.

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Hundreds of thousands of dollars were made and lost in a day’s trading, and the cagier players, like James Flood and James Fair, made millions. While the Comstock silver enabled many San Franciscans to enjoy an unsurpassed prosperity throughout the 1860s, few people gave much thought to the decade’s other major development, the building of the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869 using imported Chinese laborers. Originally set up in Sacramento to build the western link, the Central Pacific and later Southern Pacific railroad soon expanded to cover most of the West, ensnaring San Francisco in its web. Wholly owned by the so-called Big Four – Charles Crocker, Collis P.

pages: 787 words: 249,157

Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster
by Allan J McDonald and James R. Hansen
Published 25 Apr 2009

We returned to the airport immediately and climbed aboard the company's twin-engine jet. The sun was setting by the time we arrived back at our plant site, located in a remote area at the north end of the Great Salt Lake just a few miles from Promontory Point, the historic site where the Golden Spike was driven in 1869 in commemoration of the completion of America's first transcontinental railroad. In the company jet, we made several low-level passes over the burned-out casting pit before landing on our short landing strip at the northwest end of the plant site. It was the first time in memory that the company jet had been allowed to land at the plant site, due to the short length of the runway.

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The huge locomotives with these two large railcars carrying over 450 tons of rocket motors hardly slowed down, literally flattening the automobile and instantly killing the car's two occupants, although the train didn't derail or suffer any significant damage. It wasn't the only train incident. Because the shipment of our segments was such a significant event to the local railroad community back in Utah, the site of the completion of this nation's first transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific Railroad hooked up one of their old historic dining and club cars to accommodate the Thiokol people accompanying the segments to KSC. During the train's journey through the Deep South, two young renegades used the moving train for target practice. With their hunting rifles, they shot at the large yellow fiberglass railcar covers that were placed over the segments, but the bullets ended up coming through the glass windows of the dining car.

pages: 1,540 words: 400,759

Fodor's California 2014
by Fodor's
Published 5 Nov 2013

You can walk through a post-office car and peer into cubbyholes and canvas mailbags, enter a sleeping car that simulates the swaying on the roadbed and the flashing lights of a passing town at night, or glimpse inside the first-class dining car. The room containing the gold “Last Spike,” one of two cast in 1869 to commemorate the completion of the transcontinental railroad, is quietly compelling. Kids have lots of fun at this museum, especially in the play area upstairs. TIP Don’t miss the astounding exhibit of 1,000 vintage toy trains. | 125 I St., at 2nd St., Old Sacramento | 95814 | 916/445–6645 | www.csrmf.org | $10 | Daily 10–5. Capitol. The lacy plasterwork of the Capitol’s 120-foot-high rotunda has the complexity and colors of a Fabergé egg.

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Truckee 13 miles northwest of Kings Beach, 14 miles north of Tahoe City. Formerly a decrepit railroad town in the mountains, Truckee is now the trendy first stop for many Tahoe visitors. The town was officially established around 1863, and by 1868 it had gone from a stagecoach station to a major stopover for trains bound for the Pacific via the new transcontinental railroad. Freight trains and Amtrak’s California Zephyr still stop every day at the depot right in the middle of town. Stop inside the depot for a walking-tour map of historic Truckee. Across from the station, where Old West facades line the main drag, you’ll find galleries, gift shops, boutiques, old-fashioned diners, and several remarkably good restaurants.

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Greens fees: $220/$240 | Facilities: Driving range, putting green, pitching area, golf carts, pull carts, caddies, rental clubs, pro shop, golf lessons, restaurant, bar. Reno 32 miles east of Truckee, 38 miles northeast of Incline Village. Established in 1859 as a trading station at a bridge over the Truckee River, Reno grew along with the silver mines of nearby Virginia City and the transcontinental railroad that chugged through town. Train officials named it in 1868, but gambling—legalized in 1931—put Reno on the map. This is still a gambling town, with most of the casinos crowded into five square blocks downtown, but a thriving university scene and outdoor activities also attract tourists.

pages: 319 words: 105,949

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot
by Mark Vanhoenacker
Published 1 Jun 2015

I like to check the plane’s digital compass against the Southern Cross and to consider which I trust more, the near-perfect reliability of the airplane systems or my own imperfect readings of an older, astronomical arbiter. Once I read some letters written by Mark Hopkins, who was partly responsible for the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. He wrote these letters on a ship sailing from New York to San Francisco, all around South America, via Cape Horn, on the sort of sea journey his railroad would relegate to history. Transfixed by the ocean, he wrote to his brother that if he had had such an experience of the sea when he was younger, he might have devoted himself to nautical adventures rather than the “pursuits on land” that would bring him his fame and fortune.

Lonely Planet's Best of USA
by Lonely Planet

Spofford Alley As sunset falls on sociable Spofford Alley Map Google Map (g1, 15, 30, 45), you’ll hear clicking mah-jong tiles and a Chinese orchestra warming up. But generations ago, you might have overheard Sun Yat-sen and his conspirators at number 36 plotting the 1911 overthrow of China’s last dynasty. Find out More Picture what it was like to be Chinese in America during the Gold Rush, transcontinental railroad construction or Beat heyday at the Chinese Historical Society of America Map Google Map (CHSA; Map; %415-391-1188; www.chsa.org; 965 Clay St; hnoon-5pm Tue-Fri, 11am-4pm Sat; g1, 8, 30, 45, jCalifornia St, Powell-Mason, Mason-Hyde) F. This 1932 landmark was built as Chinatown’s YWCA by Julia Morgan (chief architect of Hearst Castle).

pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

This was derived from the British system created in the 1600s, when the monarch granted monopolies to groups of people to incentivize them to undertake certain ventures the government had an interest in. Alexander Hamilton, for instance, successfully argued for a federally chartered national bank, and in the 1800s the federal government granted charters to Union Pacific Railroad and others to create the transcontinental railroad.10 In the early nineteenth century, each US corporation had to receive a special charter from the legislature laying out its purpose. States granted charters to corporations to pursue very narrow purposes—for example, to build a bridge. Corporations were legally barred from going beyond the scope of their charters and could be sued for doing so.

pages: 366 words: 105,894

Moon Coastal Oregon
by Judy Jewell and W. C. McRae
Published 13 Jul 2020

Myrtlewood is particularly popular for turning into bowls—salad and serving bowls make a lovely gift or keepsake of a trip to coastal Oregon. However, the tree and its wood have been used for myriad other functional and decorative purposes for many years. Hudson’s Bay Company trappers used myrtlewood leaves to brew tea as a remedy for chills. In 1869 the golden spike marking the completion of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad (near Promontory, Utah) was driven into a highly polished myrtlewood tie. Novelist Jack London was so taken by the beauty of the wood’s swirling grain that he ordered an entire suite of furniture. During the Depression, the city of North Bend issued myrtlewood coins after the only bank in town failed.

pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

But the alternative uses for such drugs bear the hallmarks of pseudoscience: a founder story in which a lone genius discovers their utility, an evidence base of personal testimonials rather than randomized clinical trials, and unverifiable claims of unprecedented effectiveness in treating a tremendous variety of ailments.2 WHY SNAKE OIL SALESMEN DESERVE THEIR REPUTATION—BUT SNAKE OIL DOESN’T Claims of miracle therapies are commonplace today, but they reached their apex in the patent medicine era of the late nineteenth century. The transcontinental railroad was built in the 1880s, and its construction relied heavily on Chinese immigrants. This backbreaking physical labor was often the only work available to them. In the era before modern medicine, when even aspirin had yet to be discovered, laborers had few ways to quell the pain of aching joints and muscles.

pages: 918 words: 260,504

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
by William Cronon
Published 2 Nov 2009

Whether to meet the enormous demand of the Union army or to purchase goods from booming eastern wholesale centers, the commerce of the region turned ever more thoroughly away from its old channels. The war also broke the sectional deadlock in Congress, so federal funds finally went to a transcontinental railroad project, with Omaha its eastern terminus and Chicago—not St. Louis—its foremost beneficiary. One Iowan recalled that “the war, with its instant and complete diversion of trade,” gave Chicago’s commerce with the West “a wonderful impetus, and sustained it throughout. At the close of the war the direction of trade had become fixed, and Chicago had become the chief mart of the West, a position it is likely to sustain.”63 By 1870, the river had reopened and St.

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Scott, Future Great City, 32. 79.This emphasis on the trade of the “great interior” was a marked change from earlier concerns about locating a “passage to India” which would link Asian and European commerce in the heart of North America. Although interest in a route to the Orient persisted among the urban boosters, especially Gilpin, it gradually lost importance as they came to see the Great West itself as the justification for imperial urban growth. For an example of how Chicago boosters thought the opening of a transcontinental railroad might affect the city’s role in the China trade, see “Chicago to China,” Chicago Evening Journal, Nov. 25, 1868, reprinted in C. Exera Brown, Brown’s Gazeteer of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, and Branches, and of the Union Pacific Railroad: A Guide and Business Directory (1869), 37–39. 80.Albany Argus, n.d., quoted in Scott, “Progress of the West,” 163. 81.John A.

pages: 349 words: 112,333

The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con
by Amy Reading
Published 6 Mar 2012

Marks, who was born in Waukegan, Illinois, showed an early aptitude for deception by getting himself enrolled in the Union army at the age of thirteen, serving as a dispatch bearer. When the war ended, he went west, landing in Cheyenne in 1867 at the same time that the railroad arrived. The Union Pacific, in its slow dash to complete the transcontinental railroad, had reached the summit of the Black Hills that winter and was forced to wait, gathering men and materials, until construction could resume in April. More than ten thousand people massed in the brand-new town. General Grenville Dodge, the chief engineer of the Union Pacific and the man who platted the city, seemed chagrined at what he’d wrought, calling Cheyenne “the greatest gambling place ever established on the plains” and “full of desperate characters.”

pages: 399 words: 114,787

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
by David Enrich
Published 18 Feb 2020

.* It was about a quarter of a mile away from the future Trump Tower, where another rich man, needing to prove himself to the world, would live in comparable gaudiness. In September 1883, the forty-five-year-old Villard had journeyed to southwestern Montana to mark the completion of his company’s Northern Pacific Railway, a key segment of the transcontinental railroad. Always the self-publicist, he arranged for photographers to capture him swinging a large hammer to drive in the ceremonial last spike, then mounting a shiny black locomotive, festooned in American flags, like a big-game hunter standing atop his conquered prey. The audience—including a German banker named Georg von Siemens—cheered.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

When he left eight years later he traveled in a train, moving at roughly the same speed as today's presidents when they deign to travel by train.’ 32 In 1869, when Leland Stanford hammered in a final golden spike to unite the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railways at Promontory Summit in the Utah Territory, the US was for the first time linked by rail. At a stroke the transcontinental railroad seemed to change geography, time and space itself: coast-to-coast journeys were reduced in duration from six months to just six days. By the second half of the nineteenth century, thirteen miles of railway track were being laid every single day in the US alone.33 Smaller countries like the UK or France were, by this time, already stitched together into dense networks.

pages: 515 words: 117,501

Miracle Cure
by William Rosen
Published 14 Apr 2017

A mediocre company—measured by profitability or growth—without an OSRD contract was transformed into one of the most profitable simply by winning the CMR sweepstakes. It was equivalent to giving the winners a two-decade head start on the rest of an entire industry. The only comparable events in American economic history were the deals that built the transcontinental railroad and allocated the radio broadcast spectrum. The penicillin project would prove a game changer for companies like Merck and especially Pfizer, which staked its future on penicillin. When Jasper Kane, who had represented Pfizer at the October 1941 meeting of the OSRD, brought his plan for fermenting penicillin in the same sort of deep tanks the company used for producing citric acid to his boss, Pfizer president John L.

pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
by Lawrence Wright
Published 7 Jun 2021

“We’ve been having a debate for decades now about the size of government,” he told them. “The more interesting debate is the scope of government.” He used the example of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. “He decided to do the Homestead Act, land grant colleges, and to lay the foundation for the transcontinental railroad. If Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, had the idea of using government as a battering ram for opportunity, why can’t we do that today? Instead of focusing on how big government is, think about what you want it to do.” Rubio, who was chair of the Small Business Committee in the Senate, could envision the economic damage already being done and what was likely to follow.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

The doctrine, an updated version of the old concept of humanitarian imperialism and the white man’s burden, was mobilized to justify the coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2004 and NATO attacks on Libya in 2011.13 Critical to our discussion about migrant workers, the TFWP has emerged as the global prototype for labor migration. The antecedents for this program can be traced back to the late 1800s, when fifteen thousand Chinese men were brought to Canada to construct the country’s first transcontinental railroad. The workers endured low wages and deadly conditions, including landslides and explosions, that killed one worker for every mile of track laid through the Rocky Mountains.14 Today, as states contend with irregular migration, Canada’s TFWP—built upon this legacy of exploiting disposable migrant labor—is considered a model of “managed migration.”

pages: 398 words: 112,350

Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South
by Beth Macy
Published 17 Oct 2016

No longer would he have to “Chinese,” a racist bit of circus lingo that had morphed into an action verb for doing unpaid heavy labor around the show grounds. “Chinese is what you did in exchange for your sleeping quarters and cookhouse accommodations,” Stencell said of the slang, whose roots lie in the nineteenth-century Chinese immigrant laborers who built the transcontinental railroad. “The candy butchers, especially, they pulled a lot of Chinese.” In one of the few photos I found of Shelton from that era, he stands among the RB&BB circus staff with a host of other ticket takers and back-end workers. He’s paunchy, a shock of dark bangs dangling from his receding hairline.

pages: 379 words: 113,656

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 1 Feb 2003

You might, however, have suspected that such widespread hallucinations of illusionary value—not just the late 1990s infatuation with technology, but the Texas savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the crash of October 1987, the Mexican peso crises, and the bubble economies of Japan and then later Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia—are a relatively recent feature of an increasingly rugged and treacherous financial landscape. Surely in the days before automatic trading systems, round-the-clock markets, and frictionless international capital flows—before even telephones, telegraphs, or transcontinental railways—the rapid proliferation of unfounded belief, and the ready capital to back it, would have been impossible, at least on a large scale. Not so—Extraordinary Popular Delusions was published in 1841, and by that year Mackay’s subject was already two centuries old. TULIP ECONOMICS FINANCIAL CRISES, AS I SOON LEARNED FROM ANDY, ARE AT LEAST as old as the Roman Empire.

pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

In ways few people anticipated, it proved to be the mightiest instrument of domestic enforcement the country had ever seen. It can fairly be described as the largest undertaking of any kind in American history. Costing trillions upon trillions of dollars and spanning half a century, it rivals, in terms of energy invested, the peopling of the West, the building of transcontinental railways and highways, the maintenance of a Pax Americana for half a century after World War II, or, for that matter, any of the wars the country has fought, foreign or civil. On top of those conflicts, the United States has had two massive domestic policy programs that mobilized public resources and sentiments so thoroughly that they were presented to the public as what the philosopher and psychologist William James called a “moral equivalent of war”: the War on Poverty in the 1960s and the War on Drugs in the 1980s and ’90s.

pages: 383 words: 118,458

The Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Published 1 Jan 1975

There is a railway in Turkey.' He was certain Turkey was just over the hill, and the only difficulty he envisaged - indeed, it seemed a characteristic of the South Vietnamese grasp of political geography - was getting Loc Ninh out of the hands of the Viet Cong and laying track through the swamps of Cambodia. His transcontinental railway vision, taking in eight vast countries, had a single snag: evicting the enemy from this small local border town. For the Vietnamese citizen the rest of the world is simple and peaceful; he has the egoism of a sick man, who believes he is the only unlucky sufferer in a healthy world. The stationmaster said, 'Sometimes we get ambushed here.

pages: 399 words: 120,226

Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas
by John S. Burnett
Published 1 Jan 2002

Brian and the other hired guns are the guys who protect the wagon train, the ones who ride shotgun on a stagecoach through ambush country. This is no fantasy. Perhaps armed guards never really did ride up on the buck-board of stagecoaches—I only saw it in the movies—but this team of commandos is their modern-day counterpart. As the tracks of the transcontinental railroad extended slowly, mile after mile, through the untamed hostile territory of the American West, so, too, is the communications cable being laid—just as slowly, mile after mile—along the wild coastline of West Africa. Moreover, like the wagon train, stagecoach, or railroad, the cable ship and its support vessels can expect to be attacked.

pages: 420 words: 124,202

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

In his first public speech, in 1832, he spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the need for navigable rivers and canals to accommodate steamboats. In the middle of the Civil War, he signed, on July 1, 1862, the Pacific Railway Act, the authorizing legislation for what would become America’s transcontinental railroad. Even more revealing, in 1859, after his loss in the Illinois senatorial race against Stephen Douglas, he was much in demand for a speech entitled “Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements” that he gave at agricultural fairs, schools, and self-improvement societies. The speech—decidedly not one of Lincoln’s best—nonetheless revealed an enthusiasm for mechanical innovation that resonates powerfully even today.

pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2010

The case for international trade is built on the most basic ideas in economics. Trade makes us richer. Trade has the distinction of being one of the most important ideas in economics and also one of the least intuitive. Abraham Lincoln was once advised to buy cheap iron rails from Britain to finish the transcontinental railroad. He replied, “It seems to me that if we buy the rails from England, then we’ve got the rails and they’ve got the money. But if we build the rails here, we’ve got our rails and we’ve got our money.”4 To understand the benefits of trade, we must find the fallacy in Mr. Lincoln’s economics.

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

Nobody knows; but if it does, says Google’s Eric Schmidt, high-tech will lose its innovative spark and, just like other sectors, turn to rent-seeking. 35 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY Déjà vu all over again If history is any guide, the IT industry’s future will be about services and customer power ou would expect eric schmidt, one of Silicon Valley’s leading lights, to have an oversized inner geek. But these days, he sounds more like a closet historian. He enjoys talking, for instance, about how America’s transcontinental railroad in the 1860s was built on debt, a bubble and scandals. Another favourite topic is the laying of the first transatlantic cable in that period, a seemingly impossible mission. To Mr Schmidt, reading and thinking about history is a kind of redemption, for himself as well as for the high-tech industry: “We believed that the bubble would never end.

pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

sh=5beba7d41dfe 37 https://www.asianentrepreneur.org/why-are-rich-chinese-entrepreneurs-leaving-china/ 38 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092415/chinas-stock-markets-vs-us-stock-markets.asp 39 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092415/chinas-stock-markets-vs-us-stock-markets.asp 40 https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_650553.pdf 41 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2017/08/16/china-wage-levels-equal-to-or-surpass-parts-of-europe/#5f4a34d53e7f 42 https://napsintl.com/manufacturing-in-mexico/mexico-vs-china-manufacturing-comparison/ 43 https://www.economist.com/special-report/2020/02/06/china-wants-to-put-itself-back-at-the-centre-of-the-world 44 https://thediplomat.com/2017/05/reviving-the-comatose-bangladesh-china-india-myanmar-corridor/ 45 https://thediplomat.com/2016/08/tibet-and-chinas-belt-and-road/ 46 https://globalshippersalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Study_EP_IPOL_STU2018585907_EN.pdf 47 https://www.mhlnews.com/global-supply-chain/article/22042478/more-competition-for-us-west-coast-ports 48 https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/2001843/controversial-thai-canal-back-in-spotlight 49 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-canal-through-central-america-could-have-devastating-consequences-180953394/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2020/01/31/inside-the-belt-and-roads-premier-white-elephant-melaka-gateway/?sh=6cb8f63266ee 50 https://www.coha.org/the-twin-ocean-project-south-americas-transcontinental-railroad/ 51 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-arctic/china-unveils-vision-for-polar-silk-road-across-arctic-idUSKBN1FF0J8 52 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=18011 53 https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-big-chinas-belt-and-road 54 https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/fixed-income 55 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-railway-yunnan/china-completes-high-speed-rail-links-from-southwest-yunnan-idUSKBN14I07I?

pages: 424 words: 123,180

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them
by Dan Bouk
Published 22 Aug 2022

In the age of Facebook, which has made “friend” into a verb, a click, it might be easy to think that there was some completely uncorrupted past when friends were, well, friends, who knew each other fully and liked each other’s company, not just their social media posts. Of course, such true friendships did and still exist. But the corruption of “friend” is much older than Facebook. As the historian Richard White explains in his chronicle of the construction of the transcontinental railroads, the robber barons of that era called each and every congressperson they paid off and every lobbyist they employed “friends.”41 “Friends” to Rankin, Sanders, and Trapp were allies in the internecine squabbles that scarred Mississippi’s Democratic Party. And those men talked about “friends” incessantly.

pages: 476 words: 129,209

The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism
by John U. Bacon
Published 7 Nov 2017

The crew did not attempt to identify the victims, but one casualty they would never forget: a nineteen-month-old boy floating face-up, his arms folded across his chest. “I honestly hope I shall never have to come on another expedition like this,” crewman Francis Dyke said. “The doctor and I are sleeping in the middle of fourteen coffins.” St. John’s, Newfoundland, is closer to the Titanic site than Halifax, but thanks to Canada’s transcontinental railway, created by Halifax’s Sandford Fleming, Halifax’s North Street Station could access the rest of the continent within two days. Because time was of the essence when dealing with decomposing bodies, Halifax became the recovery’s base of operations. After thirteen days at sea, the Mackay-Bennett approached Halifax on April 30, 1912, eighteen days after Titanic went down.

pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Published 2 Jan 1977

The United States in 1865 had spent $103,294,501 on public works, but the South received only $9,469,363. For instance, while Ohio got over a million dollars, Kentucky, her neighbor south of the river, got $25,000. While Maine got $3 million, Mississippi got $136,000. While $83 million had been given to subsidize the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads, thus creating a transcontinental railroad through the North, there was no such subsidy for the South. So one of the things the South looked for was federal aid to the Texas and Pacific Railroad. Woodward says: “By means of appropriations, subsidies, grants, and bonds such as Congress had so lavishly showered upon capitalist enterprise in the North, the South might yet mend its fortunes—or at any rate the fortunes of a privileged elite.”

…

Thomas Edison promised New Jersey politicians $1,000 each in return for favorable legislation. Daniel Drew and Jay Gould spent $1 million to bribe the New York legislature to legalize their issue of $8 million in “watered stock” (stock not representing real value) on the Erie Railroad. The first transcontinental railroad was built with blood, sweat, politics and thievery, out of the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. The Central Pacific started on the West Coast going east; it spent $200,000 in Washington on bribes to get 9 million acres of free land and $24 million in bonds, and paid $79 million, an overpayment of $36 million, to a construction company which really was its own.

Frommer's Denver, Boulder & Colorado Springs
by Eric Peterson
Published 1 Jan 2005

Their biggest triumph was the destruction of the northeast Colorado town of Julesburg in 1865, but the cavalry, bolstered by returning Civil War veterans, managed to force the two tribes onto reservations in Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma—a barren area that whites thought they would never want. Also in 1865, a smelter was built in Black Hawk, just west of Denver, setting the stage for the large-scale spread of mining throughout Colorado. When the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the Union Pacific went through Cheyenne, Wyoming, 100 miles north of Denver; 4 years later the Kansas City– Denver Railroad linked the line to Denver. Colorado politicians had begun pressing for statehood during the Civil War, but it wasn’t until August 1, 1876, that Colorado became the 38th state.

pages: 666 words: 131,148

Frommer's Seattle 2010
by Karl Samson
Published 10 Mar 2010

George Vancouver in 1792, Port Townsend did not attract its first settlers until 1851. By the 1880s, however, the town had become a major shipping port and was expected to grow into one of the most important cities on the West Coast. Port Townsend residents felt that their city was the logical end of the line for the transcontinental railroad that was pushing westward in the 1880s, and based on the certainty of a railroad connection, real-estate speculation and development boomed. Merchants and investors erected mercantile palaces along Water Street and elaborate Victorian homes on the bluff above the wharf district. Unfortunately, the railroad never arrived.

pages: 400 words: 129,841

Capitalism: the unknown ideal
by Ayn Rand
Published 15 Aug 1966

Actually, government help to the railroads amounted to ten percent of the cost of all the railroads in the country—and the consequences of this help have been disastrous to the railroads. I quote from The Story of American Railroads by Stewart H. Holbrook: In a little more than two decades, three transcontinental railroads were built with government help. All three wound up in bankruptcy courts. And thus, when James Jerome Hill said he was going to build a line from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound, without government cash or land grant, even his close friends thought him mad. But his Great Northern arrived at Puget Sound without a penny of federal help, nor did it fail.

pages: 411 words: 136,413

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought
by Ayn Rand , Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwartz
Published 1 Jan 1989

(This is one of the reasons why science perishes under dictatorships, though technology may survive for a short while.) It is said that without the “unlimited” resources of the government, such an enormous project would not have been undertaken. No, it would not have been—at this time. But it would have been, when the economy was ready for it. There is a precedent for this situation. The first transcontinental railroad of the United States was built by order of the government, on government subsidies. It was hailed as a great achievement (which, in some respects, it was). But it caused economic dislocations and political evils, for the consequences of which we are paying to this day in many forms. If the government deserves any credit for the space program, it is only to the extent that it did not act as a government, i.e., did not use coercion in regard to its participants (which it used in regard to its backers, i.e., the taxpayers).

pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

It was harder to be a feminist in the preindustrial world, when a teenage wife might become pregnant ten times in order to deliver seven healthy babies, in order to ensure that five survived childhood diseases, in order to guarantee that three or four made it safely to adulthood—in an age without washing machines, vacuum cleaners, electricity, antiseptics, disposable diapers, infant formula, antibiotics, and vaccinations. Husbands did not resent getting off their couches to help their working spouses by carrying out the garbage and instead toiled fourteen hours in the field in hopes that nature did not destroy the family grain crop. The Irish workers on the transcontinental railroad were racist in their attitudes toward rival Chinese laborers. But then again, they bled and died with about the same frequency as the exploited Chinese. They too had small hope of a long and healthy life. And they were likewise considered the scum of the earth by their distant grandee employers.

pages: 469 words: 137,880

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
by Harold James
Published 15 Jan 2023

The transatlantic cable had carried news since 1858, though the second cable (1865) was more capacious and reliable. Steamships drove down bulk carriage costs, and at the same time the railroad opened up the interior of continents. In 1869 the Suez Canal was completed and the last spike hammered in America’s transcontinental railroad. The American national poet Walt Whitman celebrated in “The Passage to India”: The earth to be spann’d, connected by network, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, The lands to be welded together. And in “To a Locomotive in Winter,” he eulogized the “type of the modern!

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010
by T M Devine
Published 25 Aug 2011

The entire system was lubricated by the revolution in transportation and the flow of information: improvements in the design and speed of sailing ships; the arrival of the ocean-going steamships; the crucial invention of the telegraph, at a stroke providing instant commercial intelligence; and the construction of transcontinental railways, such as the Canadian–Pacific. These unlocked the production potential of vast territories, from the prairies of North America to the plains of India, while the opening of the Suez Canal transformed the connections with Asia and the East. In the centre of all this, like the proverbial spider in the web, was Britain, as the main entrepôt for world trade and finance.13 At the same time, the system of tariffs, regulations and controls which had been at the heart of the old imperial system in the eighteenth century were all swept away by the 1850s.

Frommer's California 2009
by Matthew Poole , Harry Basch , Mark Hiss and Erika Lenkert
Published 2 Jan 2009

T H E S A N F R A N C I S CO B AY A R E A Although it’s less than a doz en miles from San Francisco, Oakland is worlds apar t from its sister city acr oss the bay. Originally little mor e than a cluster of ranches and farms, Oakland exploded in siz e and stature practically overnight, when the last mile of transcontinental railroad track was laid down. Major shipping ports soon followed and, to this day, Oakland remains one of the busiest industrial por ts on the West Coast. The price for economic success, ho wever, is O akland’s lowbrow reputation as a pr edominantly working-class city, forever in San Francisco’s chic shadow.

…

Although the area has cobblestone streets, wooden sidewalks, and authentic Gold Rush–era architecture, the high concentration of T-shirt shops and other gimmicky stor es has turned it into a sor t of historical amusement par k. Nonetheless, there are interesting things to see, such as wher e the Pony Express ended and the transcontinental railroad—and the Republican Party—began. The California State Railroad Museum (see below) is loved by railroad buffs, and the Sacramento Jazz Festival, mostly Dixieland, draws more than 100 bands from around the world for 4 days of madness over 351 Kids Where the Wild Things Are The Main Attractions California Sta te C apitol Closely r esembling a scale model of the U.S.

…

Sutter Creek The self-proclaimed “nicest little to wn in the M other Lode,” Sutter Creek was named after sawmill o wner John Sutter, employer of J ames Marshall (whose disco very of gold triggered the 1849 G old R ush). Railr oad bar on Leland S tanford made his for tune at Sutter Creek’s Lincoln Mine and then invested his millions to build the transcontinental railroad and fund his successful California gubernatorial campaign. The town is a charmer, lined with beautiful 19th-century buildings in pristine condition, including Downs Mansion, the former home of the for eman at S tanford’s mine (now a priv ate r esidence on S panish S t., acr oss fr om the I mmaculate Conception Church), and the landmar k Knight’s Foundry, 81 Eureka St., off M ain Street, the last water-powered foundry and machine shop in the nation.

pages: 564 words: 153,720

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
by Mark Pendergrast
Published 2 Jan 2000

Yet within a few years, under the co-direction of clerk and subsequent partner George Huntington Hartford, it was christened the Great American Tea Company, specializing in tea, with over a dozen stores in Manhattan. Soon they added coffee. Gilman and Hartford eliminated middlemen, buying coffee and tea on the docks straight off the clipper ships. In 1869 the Great American Tea Company became the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, ostensibly in honor of the completion of the transcontinental railroad that year. It also signaled the company’s plans for expansion beyond the East Coast of the United States. In 1871, in the aftermath of the Chicago Fire, the company sent staff and food, staying to open stores in the Midwest. In 1878 Hartford officially took over the operation, while Gilman retired.

pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom
by Doug Henwood
Published 30 Aug 1998

Money, "the god among commodities," becomes the principal object of greed — greed in its most general form, for wealth itself, rather than more specific obsessions, "for clothes, weapons, jewels, women, wine, etc."^° Certainly 19th century magnates loved their money, but they also took pride in the physical capital they owned — steel mills and transcontinental railroads. Such obsessions now seem quaint; modern tycoons love their portfolios most of all. Interest-bearing capital, Marx (1971, pp. 454-539) wrote, is the most fetishistic form of all, capital par excellence, with profit (interest) appearing with no more than the mere passage of time, with no apparent engagement with production: money-bearing becomes characteristic of capital "just as growth is characteristic of trees."

pages: 522 words: 150,592

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories
by Simon Winchester
Published 27 Oct 2009

They did so especially in Victorian and Edwardian times, a period of both British and American history when the stupendously difficult often seemed unusually possible; this was a time when unraveling the immensity of an ocean looked only marginally more difficult than, say, the cataloging of all the earth’s creatures, or the corralling between hard book covers of all the words of the English language, or the building of a transcontinental railroad, or the construction of a canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Fame in the early days belonged to the explorers, those hunting for land and territory and tangible acquisitions, rather than to students of the ocean itself. Bold adventurers like James Cook, Sir John Ross, the Comte de la Pérouse, Robert Fitzroy, and the Chevalier de Bougainville are still remembered and memorialized in capes and straits and islands around the world—while the very earliest true oceanographers have largely faded from memory.

pages: 499 words: 152,156

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
by Evan Osnos
Published 12 May 2014

In most countries, the long-term effects of kleptocracy are easy to predict: economists calculate that for every point that a nation’s corruption rises on a scale of one to ten, its economic growth drops by 1 percent. (Think Haiti under François Duvalier or Zaire under Mobutu.) But the exceptions are important. In Japan and Korea, corruption accompanied each nation’s rise, not its collapse. There is no more conspicuous case than the United States. When promoters of the first transcontinental railroad were found to have secretly paid themselves to build it—the 1872 scandal known as Crédit Mobilier—the scale of plunder was described by the press as “the most damaging exhibition of official and private villainy and corruption ever laid bare to the gaze of the world.” Between 1866 and 1873 the country put down thirty-five thousand miles of track, minting enormous fortunes but also, as Mark Twain put it, displaying “shameful corruption.”

pages: 535 words: 151,217

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers
by Simon Winchester
Published 27 Oct 2015

With more imagination than commercial good sense, perhaps, Kinney placed antique-looking stores along them and then named his creation for the Venice that he had so admired in Italy. The canals were eventually filled in and replaced by roads, but Venice Beach remains. Henry Huntington, nephew of one of the backers of the transcontinental railroad, who was in amiable competition with this same uncle for the laying of rail links within Los Angeles, built his coastal experiment rather more modestly than Kinney, and well to the south. He arranged, presciently, that one of the lines for the red-enameled streetcars of his Pacific Electric railway company would terminate at his stretch of beachfront, bringing customers out of the city and to the ocean.

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
by Robert Higgs and Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.
Published 15 Jan 1987

Under these dynamic conditions, to adopt new ways of life and new kinds of production was the road to wealth-or, for the less fortunate, at least an avenue of survival. The era also witnessed the rise of many giant corporations and the emergence of the "trust question" as a major political issue. The interregional railroads, appearing on the American scene at mid-century, were the first giant enterprises. After the Civil War several transcontinental railroads, all but the Great Northern the beneficiaries of federal land grants, were completed. Chastened by scandals connected with the government's subsidization of these enterprises, Congress made no new railroad land grants after 1871, but in the nostrils of many people the odor of something rotten-corruption and special, unwarranted privilege at the expense of the general publiclingered about the land-grant railroads for decades.

pages: 459 words: 144,009

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
by Jared Diamond
Published 6 May 2019

My first trip to Indonesia was in 1979, when I began my visit by staying in a hotel whose lobby walls were decorated with paintings telling the story of Indonesian history. In the United States a similar exhibit might display paintings of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the California gold rush, the transcontinental railroads, and other such subjects from 150 to 250 years ago. But in that Indonesian hotel lobby, all of the paintings showed events of just the previous 35 years. The event that was the subject of most paintings was termed the 1965 Communist Revolt. Paintings, and explanatory text below them, vividly depicted how communists tortured and killed seven generals; and how one of the generals that the communists tried to kill managed to escape from his house over a wall, but his five-year-old daughter was shot by accident and died a few days later.

The Mission: A True Story
by David W. Brown
Published 26 Jan 2021

might well have been a question, because men and women still walked the Earth who were there, and actually did. Katy’s big break came on May 10, 1869, when railroad magnate Leland Stanford—later founder of the university—drove a golden spike through a steel rail in Utah, at last hammering together the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans with the skinny, sun-warmed lines of the Transcontinental Railroad. Over time railways spiderwebbed outward from the main line to junction towns, and here, just west of Houston, this sleepy stagecoach stopover with its verdant fields of farmland suddenly became one such interchange, connecting Missouri, Kansas, and Texas by way of a new junction: the MKT, but what locals and passers-through called simply the KT.172 The town built a train depot, and the name stuck, but spelled phonetically.

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

They were captains of finance, not industry. They knew how to raise money by selling bonds: Cooke’s brilliantly orchestrated campaigns financed the Union victory in the Civil War; within a few years after the Confederate surrender, Cooke and his contemporaries were deploying similar strategies to build transcontinental railroads. The difference was that war bond buyers were supporting the survival of the Union, a cause with visceral, palpable meaning to them, while railroad bond buyers were speculating on the future prospects of enterprises that barely existed, except on paper. The bonded debt of American railroads rose from $416 million in 1867 to $2.23 billion in 1874—with a pause for the Panic of 1873—to $5.055 billion in 1890.

The Old Patagonian Express
by Paul Theroux
Published 23 Sep 1979

(I think he is the same William Brigham who nearly electrocuted himself in Hawaii when he touched a wooden stick which a native magician had loaded with some high voltage mumbo-jumbo.) Brigham soon makes his fears particular: 'When the Northern Railroad extends through Guatemala, when the Transcontinental Railway traverses the plains of Honduras, and the Nicaraguan Canal unites the Atlantic and the Pacific, the charm will be broken, the mulepath and the mozo de cargo (carrier of bundles) will be supplanted, and a journey across Central America become almost as dull as a journey from Chicago to Cheyenne.'

pages: 516 words: 159,734

War Without Mercy: PACIFIC WAR
by John Dower
Published 11 Apr 1986

Women, criminals, the poor and dispossessed, and despised nationalities in general could be and were all relegated to subordinate status under this theorizing–and it was exactly this sort of pseudoscientific dogma that Franz Boas and his disciples sought to repudiate with their great emphasis on culture, enculturation, and socialization.7 In the United States, attitudes nurtured in the harshness of slavery and Indian fighting, reinforced by the new scientific racism, also shaped perceptions of another group of Asians in the latter half of the nineteenth century: the Chinese, whom many Americans first encountered as immigrants brought over to help build the transcontinental railway. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson, traveling that same railway in the 1890s, offered a moving picture of how white people now grouped the Chinese with the unfortunate remnants of the Indian tribes. His fellow Caucasian passengers, Stevenson recorded, treated the Native Americans and Chinese almost identically as “despised races.”

pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power
by Michel Aglietta
Published 23 Oct 2018

This disconnection between the issuance of money and the seasonal agricultural cycle intensified the monetary conflict between the states of the West and the Midwest, who demanded elastic banking credit, and the financial interests of the East, who emphasised the need for sound money. After winning the war and establishing themselves in power, the Republicans were entirely won over to the cause of the now-booming industrial capitalism. In an age of transcontinental railways, the Republicans wanted to promote heavy industry, oil exploration and steelmaking. They considered it necessary to reduce the war debt in order to channel savings towards the accumulation of industrial capital. Seeking to re-establish confidence in money, the Republican majority in Congress decided to redeem greenbacks at face value, with the 1875 Resumption Act.

pages: 546 words: 176,169

The Cold War
by Robert Cowley
Published 5 May 1992

By the time of his death in 2002, Professor Ambrose had written more than thirty books, including multivolume biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon (from which this article was excerpted), as well as such bestsellers as Undaunted Courage, the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition; Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869; and his accounts of the end of World War II in Europe, D-Day, Citizen Soldiers, The Victors, Wild Blue, and Band of Brothers (which was made into a hit television miniseries). Ambrose was founder of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. OF THE MANY CONTROVERSIES that swirl around the American role in the Vietnam War, one of the most contentious centers on the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in December 1972.

pages: 565 words: 164,405

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
by William J. Bernstein
Published 5 May 2009

With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian Seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.36 Refrigerated vehicles began to appear in the 1830s. Photographs taken at Promontory, Utah in 1869, just after the opening of the transcontinental railroad, reveal a long string of the distinctive Union Pacific fruit cars used to carry out-of-season grapes, pears, and peaches to astonished easterners. Other chilled cargoes ranged from cut flowers to sides of beef, and these bounteous luxuries fed consumers' demand for more. By the mid-nineteenth century, a higher tonnage of ice, bound for India, Europe, and around the Horn to the West Coast, was shipped out of Boston harbor than any other product.

pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

For a large pool of hustlers to be successful, of course, requires a large population of easy believers. The California Gold Rush accelerated the westward migration of dreamy Americans. Many people had solid reasons to go west. But once there was an industry based on moving Americans west—the transcontinental railroads—a large and continuous stream of travelers and settlers was required to sustain those new entrepreneurial businesses. Which meant that the railroads and their allies needed to sell the settlers fantasies, as the original New World speculators had done to prospective Americans back in the 1600s.

pages: 532 words: 162,509

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
by Andrés Reséndez
Published 11 Apr 2016

American leaders of the 1850s and 1860s became aware of the phenomenon of Indian slavery only slowly, and Washington’s crackdown on the other slavery occurred by fits and starts. To be sure, federal agents in the West kept sending reports to Washington about Indians held in bondage. But the West was still a world away prior to the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869: months of travel by wagon across the plains or by ship around South America. Easterners readily identified the South’s system of chattel slavery as a major national problem, but they had tremendous difficulty rallying against the West’s kaleidoscopic, shadowy, and ever-changing labor practices concerning Chinese coolies, Mexican peons, and American Indian slaves.

pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

Most often, in fast-moving fields like science and technology, maps are wrong simply because so much is unknown. Each entrepreneur, each inventor, is also an explorer, trying to make sense of what’s possible, what works and what doesn’t, and how to move forward. Think of the entrepreneurs working to develop the US transcontinental railroad in the mid-nineteenth century. The idea was first proposed in 1832, but it wasn’t even clear that the project was feasible until the 1850s, when the US House of Representatives provided the funding for an extensive series of surveys of the American West, a precursor to any actual construction.

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 1 Jan 1999

When they returned to San Francisco, Olmsted sent Rick and Codman on a tour of Santa Cruz and the Napa Valley and himself went to Palo Alto, Stanford’s estate in the Santa Clara Valley. Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator who had been governor of California, but he was best known for pushing to completion the first transcontinental railroad. An impressive, bearlike figure, he had amassed money, power, and land—over eight thousand acres on which he planned to build the university. The first order of business was to decide on a site for the future campus. Palo Alto rose from a flat plain into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

pages: 665 words: 159,350

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else
by Jordan Ellenberg
Published 14 May 2021

The westward progress was just as uneven; the flu got to Salt Lake City by the second week in January and arrived in San Francisco in mid-April, but didn’t make it to Seattle, at roughly the same distance from Toronto as the crow flies, until June. That’s because flu doesn’t travel as the crow flies. It travels as the train runs. The transcontinental railroad, then only three years old, carried horses and disease from the center of the country directly to San Francisco, and rail lines joining Toronto with the big coastal cities and Chicago seeded early outbreaks in those cities, too. Unmechanized travel to places away from the rail lines was slower, and so the epizootic got there later.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

pages: 559 words: 161,035

Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools
by Steven Brill
Published 15 Aug 2011

In a city where interest groups like the education community gossip and fight over a $5 million or $10 million grant award, the race was now on to figure out what this multibillion-dollar Race to the Top was actually going to look like. A month later, on March 10, Obama provided vague clues in a speech to a Washington meeting of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Invoking Lincoln’s building of the transcontinental railroad during the Civil War, he made the case that America could and should, despite the economic crisis, get to work on “doing a far better job educating our sons and daughters” because we had “let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.”

pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

It would have changed the history of the subject substantially, I think.” ♦ In standard English, as Russell noted, it is one hundred and eleven thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven. 7 | INFORMATION THEORY (All I’m After Is Just a Mundane Brain) Perhaps coming up with a theory of information and its processing is a bit like building a transcontinental railway. You can start in the east, trying to understand how agents can process anything, and head west. Or you can start in the west, with trying to understand what information is, and then head east. One hopes that these tracks will meet. —Jon Barwise (1986)♦ AT THE HEIGHT OF THE WAR, in early 1943, two like-minded thinkers, Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, met daily at teatime in the Bell Labs cafeteria and said nothing to each other about their work, because it was secret.♦ Both men had become cryptanalysts.

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
by John Darwin
Published 12 Feb 2013

Chinese came to Australia at the time of its gold rush in the early 1850s, and some moved on to New Zealand when gold was found there a decade or so later. Others crossed the Pacific (or came up from California) to British Columbia, first to its gold fields and then, in the 1880s, to work on constructing the Canadian Pacific – the transcontinental railway that was built from both ends and met in the Rockies. Indians were brought to Natal to work in its cane fields as indentured labour. Chinese were brought to the Rand to restart the gold mines after the Anglo–Boer War of 1899–1902. In each of these cases, white settler communities grew more and more hostile.

pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

Denver isn’t a mountain town so much as a railroad one, resting at the foot of the Rockies where the pioneers ran out of plains. It was a mining town too, a terminus where gold and silver riches collected before heading east by train. It wasn’t an obvious hub. When the Golden Spike linked the Transcontinental Railroad’s tracks in 1869, they bypassed the city completely. The Union Pacific’s president pronounced Denver “too dead to bury,” but desperate boosters sprinted to build a new line connecting them, ensuring its place as capital of the Rockies. This time around, the taxpayers were more skeptical.

pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
by Joshua Foer , Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton
Published 19 Sep 2016

WYOMING PhinDeli Town BUFORD Until 2013, PhinDeli was known as Buford. The town sign provided a unique photo opportunity: Planted beside the dusty main road, it read Buford; Pop: 1; Elev: 8000. That one crucial person tallied was Don Sammons, a Vietnam vet who moved to Buford in 1980. Founded in 1866 during the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad, Buford reached a peak population of around 2,000 people. As the rail line moved west, however, so did the workers. When Sammons, his wife, Terry, and son arrived in Buford in 1980 hoping for a quiet life, they got it: The trio comprised the entire population of Buford. In 1992, the family bought the town—consisting of a gas station, convenience store, modular home, garage, and surrounding land—for $155,000.

pages: 709 words: 191,147

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg
Published 20 Jun 2016

When the ink dried on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Polk had acquired what would become the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, plus portions of Colorado and Wyoming. Democratic president Franklin Pierce added to Polk’s booty in 1854, when he secured the so-called Gadsden Purchase, a strip of land tacked on to the southern edge of the New Mexico Territory. This latest investment had been vigorously urged on by the alluring gamble of building a transcontinental railroad to advance southern cotton interests.6 Intellectual currents were affected by transcontinentalism, as a new idiom captured the public’s imagination. Advancing beyond Jefferson’s concept of a nation with no inherited aristocracy, Americans embraced an imperial destiny grounded in biological determinism.

pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

A similar pattern operated inside the territory of the United States. As the railroads provided swifter access to markets in the rapidly growing eastern and midwestern cities, the acreage under cereals in the Western states grew by a 100 percent between 1870 and 1890, and in turn wheat production doubled to half a billion bushels a year. The third transcontinental railroad in the United States, the Northern Pacific, was completed in the year of the Dunedin’s pioneering voyage, adding cereals from the Dakotas as well as Pacific Coast lumber to the supply. Fanning out from Chicago, more railroads connected ranchers and livestock farmers to the Union stockyards where four hundred million animals were slaughtered between 1865 and 1900 to be redistributed as meat to the rest of the country.

The Big Score
by Michael S. Malone
Published 20 Jul 2021

University on 80,000 acres of prime farmland just a few hundred yards from the Palo Alto tree. Stanford University would in time become one of the world’s greatest academic institutions, a monument to benevolence that would all but erase the memory of all those dead Chinese laborers buried along the path of the transcontinental railroad. At the time of Stanford University’s opening, in 1891, the New York Mail and Express wrote with characteristic subtlety that “the need for another university in California is about as great as that of an asylum for decayed sea captains in Switzerland.” It would not be the last time that the East Coast press would underestimate the Valley’s vitality.

pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland
by Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham
Published 10 Jan 2023

Badges were handed out to allies of mayors and council members. This favoritism often had an ethnic cast, with Irish, Italian, and other immigrants looking out for their fellow countrymen. From its founding in 1852, Oakland was a West Coast boomtown drawing huge investments of capital thanks to the siting of the first transcontinental railroad, which terminated at the city’s port in 1869. This drew labor, including European immigrants and white workers from the East Coast who settled in West Oakland and the downtown area. As in the rest of the nation, Oakland’s workers were frequently pitted against one another by the railroads, major shipping companies, and factories.

pages: 593 words: 183,240

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

The ability for both to specialize was of great economic value. The social returns on the investments in technology and infrastructure that created this late nineteenth-century world economy were enormous. Consider just one example: economic historian Robert Fogel calculated that the social rate of return on the Union Pacific’s transcontinental railroad was some 30 percent per year.25 The growth of trade meant that the logic of comparative advantage could be deployed to its limit. Wherever there was a difference across two countries in the value of textiles relative to ironmongery—or any other two nonspoilable goods—there was profit to be made and societal well-being to be enhanced by exporting the good that was relatively cheap in your country and importing the good that was relatively dear.

pages: 7,371 words: 186,208

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
by Giovanni Arrighi
Published 15 Mar 2010

The main military objective of the government became the wresting of the continent from the native Indian population, following Benjamin Franklin’s long-standing prescription, while legislation passed during or immediately after the civil war promoted the centralization of banking, the protection of domestic industries through a sharp increase in tariffs, the settlement and exploitation of land, the formation of transcontinental railway and telegraph systems, and the inflow of immigrants from Europe (cf. Williams 1969: 185-93). As a result more land was occupied by farmers, cattle-breeders, and speculators in the thirty years that followed the civil war than in the previous three centuries. The ensuing rapid expansion of primary production, in turn, created the supply and demand conditions for the complementary formation of a larger and diversified national industrial apparatus.

pages: 717 words: 196,908

The Idea of Decline in Western History
by Arthur Herman
Published 8 Jan 1997

Those changes had indeed been cataclysmic. In 1870 America’s farms still produced more wealth than its factories; by 1900 industrial production was three times the value of agriculture. Within ten years of the Civil War, all the major personalities and institutions of the modern industrial age were suddenly in place. The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and one year later John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil Company in the oil fields of western Pennsylvania. The following year J. Pierpont Morgan founded Drexel, Morgan and Company and became the most powerful banker in the world. In 1876 Andrew Carnegie created the prototype of all industrial corporations, United States Steel, Thomas A.

pages: 613 words: 200,826

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles
by Michael Gross
Published 1 Nov 2011

Like his subdivision, Preuss has been mostly forgotten; Preuss Road, which honored the doctor, is today the chic shopping street Robertson Boulevard. Los Angeles The railroad changed everything. After May 1869, when a golden spike linking the Central Pacific to the Union Pacific was driven at Promontory Point in Utah, it became possible to travel from New York to Alameda, the terminus of the transcontinental railroad just outside San Francisco. In addition, the Southern Pacific Railroad had been formed to lay rails through California’s interior, and in 1876, the first train from San Francisco reached Los Angeles. It was only a few years more before Pullman cars with service equal to that of the best hotels and restaurants linked the coasts.

pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

In the three decades since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan inaugurated the market revolution, it appears that Britain and the US have joined their ranks.”18 Perhaps the most pronounced example of regulatory capture during nineteenth-century America were the railroads. Shopkeeper Leland Stanford became a rich railroad mogul not by driving spikes but by representing a few California merchants in Washington just as the nascent transcontinental railroad system began to take shape. More than two decades later, in 1887, the Interstate Commerce Commission was established to corral railroad barons like him, who routinely exploited employees with low wages while cheating farmers with collusively high rates. In a lesson for the ages, however, the ICC quickly fell under the sway of those very same railroaders.

A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn - the Last Great Battle of the American West
by James Donovan
Published 24 Mar 2008

Into the early 1870s, the northern plains remained relatively quiet and peaceful. But the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ turpitude steadily increased the natives’ ire, and starving warriors stepped up their raiding. In addition to the lack of annuities and the poor quality of the rations delivered, two transcontinental railroads, the Union Pacific and the Kansas Pacific, had recently been completed and carried even more emigrants into Indian lands. Even worse, the great buffalo herds were almost gone, scared off by the railroads and then killed off — gradually at first and then more quickly. Sherman and Sheridan’s troops aided the annihilation, visiting the same “total war” of food-supply destruction upon the Plains Indians as they had upon the Confederacy.51 Hide hunters slaughtered more than a million buffalo a year in the early 1870s.

pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

In the 1850s, the ‘elite developmentalist’ wing of the Republican Party emerged as the chief vessel for commercial interests.17 In 1864, the Republican Party enacted legislation permitting imported contract labour and ‘reaffirmed the historic role of the United States as an asylum for the oppressed of all nations’, endorsing a ‘liberal and just immigration policy, which would encourage foreign immigration’.18 After 1849, thousands of Chinese – disproportionately male – entered California during the gold rush. By 1880, they made up over 10 per cent of the population of the golden state. Chinese contract labourers were first recruited in the 1860s, used by railway magnates to construct the transcontinental railroad because they could be paid a third less than white workers. ‘All I want in my business is muscle,’ declared a large employer in California in the 1870s. ‘I don’t care whether it be obtained from a Chinaman or a white man – from a mule or a horse!’19 Southern elites, not least Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forest, called for Chinese immigration to quell black labour demands after the Civil War.20 This neatly delineates the difference between the white nationalism of northern free-soil republicans and the white supremacy of southern slaveholders.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

Rather than purely a realm of bootstrapping individualists, the West was a world made possible by government intervention—the drawing of boundary lines, the apportionment of land and resources, the removal of native peoples and replacement by American homesteaders, and the heavy subsidy of major infrastructure projects like the transcontinental railroad. See Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). 7. Tim Berners-Lee, “Information Management: A Proposal,” March 1989, May 1990, w3.org, https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html, archived at https://perma.cc/56D4-RJLE. 8.

Energy and Civilization: A History
by Vaclav Smil
Published 11 May 2017

Colvin) 1864 Open-hearth steelmaking process (W. and F. Siemens) 1865 Nitrocellulose (J. F. E. Schultze) 1866 Carbon-zinc battery (Georges Leclanche) Transatlantic cable in permanent operation Torpedo (Robert Whitehead) 1867 Refrigerated railway wagons in service 1869 Suez Canal completed U.S. transcontinental railroad completed 1870s Refrigerated transport of meat by ocean ships Phosphate fertilizer industry begins 1871 Ring-wound armature dynamo (Z. T. Gramme) 1875 Dynamite (Alfred Nobel) 1874 Photographic film (George Eastman) 1876 Four-stroke internal combustion engine (N. A. Otto) Telephone patented (Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray) 1877 Phonograph (Thomas A.

pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism
by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
Published 8 Oct 2012

The financial futures revolution could not have been implemented, as the head of the CME who initiated the process in 1971 (with the help of Milton Friedman) put it, “without the cadre of traders who left the known risks of the cattle, hog and pork belly pits for the unknown dangers of foreign exchange.” Leo Melamed, Leo Melamed on the Markets: Twenty Years of Financial History as Seen by the Man Who Revolutionized the Markets, New York: John Wiley, 1993, p. 43. 17 As Bruce Cumings has put it, “The transcontinental railway symbolized the completion of the national territory—by the 1860s America was a linked continental empire. But distant connections to isolated Western towns and farms, Pony Express mail service, and peripheral mudflats like Los Angeles, do not a national market make. Instead for fifty years (roughly from 1890 to 1940) Americans peopled and filled in the national territory.

Colorado
by Lonely Planet

Even into the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of emigrants followed the Oregon Trail across the Continental Divide to South Pass, where they split up to reach various destinations. The Mormons came fleeing persecution in New York and the Midwest. In the late 1860s, completion of the Transcontinental Railroad across southern Wyoming slowed the inexorable march of wagon trains. FATE OF THE NATIVE AMERICANS The US governments signed treaties to defuse Native American objections to expanding settlement, and established huge reservations and issued rations to compensate Native Americans for the loss of hunting territory.

pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History
by Ada Ferrer
Published 6 Sep 2021

Tricked or kidnapped in Macao, Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, and elsewhere, they were transported to Cuba, often on US-owned ships, and bound for eight years to work on Cuban plantations. The workforce on Ripley’s plantation was composed of both enslaved Africans and Chinese contract workers. She used Chinese men as domestics, a fact that startled American guests on the plantation. While Chinese workers were already in the United States building the transcontinental railroad, Ripley had no personal experience to draw on to command them. She observed them, hypothesized on their character, tested the limits of their obedience, even of their hunger. It was hunger that provoked them one morning to descend on the plantation house, throw stones at the overseer, and shout their refusal to work.

pages: 753 words: 233,306

Collapse
by Jared Diamond
Published 25 Apr 2011

The mills' closing has meant the loss of many high-paying unionized jobs, as well as of traditional Montanan self-image. Elsewhere in Montana, outside the Bitterroot Valley, much private timberland remains, most of it originating from government land grants made in the 1860s to the Great Northern Railroad as an inducement for building a transcontinental railroad. In 1989 that land was spun off from the railroads to a Seattle-based entity called Plum Creek Timber Company, organized for tax purposes as a real estate investment trust (so that its earnings will be taxed at lower rates as capital gains), and now the largest owner of private timberland in Montana and the second-largest one in the U.S.

pages: 389 words: 210,632

Frommer's Oregon
by Karl Samson
Published 26 Apr 2010

Nurtured on steady rains, such trees as Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, Western red cedar, Port Orford cedar, and hemlock grew tall and straight, sometimes as tall as 300 feet. The first sawmill in the Northwest began operation near presentday Vancouver, Washington, in 1828, and between the 1850s and the 1870s, Northwest sawmills supplied the growing California market as well as a limited foreign market. When the transcontinental railroads arrived in the 1880s, a whole new market opened up, and mills began shipping to the eastern states. Lumber companies developed a cutand-run policy that leveled the forests. By the turn of the century, the government had gained more control over public forests in an attempt to slow the decimation 17 2 LO O K I N G B AC K AT O R E G O N 05_537718-ch02.indd 17 1805, when Lewis and Clark had first passed this way, the Nez Perce tribe (the name means “pierced nose” in French) had been friendly to the white settlers.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
by Alan Greenspan
Published 14 Jun 2007

It is difficult for a twenty-first-century American to comprehend the extent to which government was separated from business in those early years. The little corruption that existed drew large newspaper headlines. There were questionable transactions relating to the construction of canals in the early 1800s. Similarly, the building of the transcontinental railroad, with its huge land-grant subsidies, engendered much duplicitous activity, leading to the Union Pacific-Credit Mobilier scandal of 1872. As infrequent as they were, such scandals are what people remember of that period. Despite the heavy involvement of government in business since the 1930s, a number of countries have achieved high ratings for staying free of corruption, even though their civil servants have potentially sellable discretion in fulfilling their regulatory roles.

China: A History
by John Keay
Published 5 Oct 2009

Moreover, the movement and storage of this agricultural surplus was the only insurance against the ever-present threat of famine and was a strategic necessity for provisioning frontier garrisons and supporting military ventures beyond. The Grand Canal, linking the Yangzi region with its rice surplus to the heavily populated and famine-prone northern plains, thus had a similar effect to the first transcontinental railroads in North America. It made China’s economic integration feasible. Disparities of climate, terrain, produce and demographic distribution were suddenly converted into assets. Granaries – which were less mud-built silos than vast installations, walled and guarded, like oil-storage depots – were strategically located along the canal.

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
by Robert B. Zoellick
Published 3 Aug 2020

Seward lost this great land deal after Parliament passed the British North America Act of 1867, which created the Canadian Confederation out of the four eastern provinces; London wanted to strengthen the security of the Dominion against the victorious and resentful colossus to the south. The new Confederation thwarted Seward’s move with a better bid: Canada offered to assume British Columbia’s debts and committed to construct a transcontinental railway to bind the Canadian provinces together. Seward had to console himself with the belief that Canada would grow closer to the United States than to Britain over time.55 Seward called the Pacific the “Far West.” In 1867, the United States took possession of Brooks Island, later known as Midway Island, under a law that then senator Seward had advanced in the 1850s.

pages: 801 words: 242,104

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Published 2 Jan 2008

The mills’ closing has meant the loss of many high-paying unionized jobs, as well as of traditional Montanan self-image. Elsewhere in Montana, outside the Bitterroot Valley, much private timberland remains, most of it originating from government land grants made in the 1860s to the Northern Pacific Railroad as an inducement for building a transcontinental railroad. In 1989 that land was spun off from the railroads to a Seattle-based entity called Plum Creek Timber Company, organized for tax purposes as a real estate investment trust (so that its earnings will be taxed at lower rates as capital gains), and now the largest owner of private timberland in Montana and the second-largest one in the U.S.

The Rough Guide to New York City
by Martin Dunford
Published 2 Jan 2009

He was not joined by significant numbers of his countrymen – and they were virtually all men – until the 1870s. By 1880, the Chinese population had risen from just 75 to an estimated 700, and the 1890 census recorded about 12,000 Chinese. Most of these men had previously worked out West on the transcontinental railroad or in gold mines, and few intended to stay in the US.Their idea was simply to make a nest egg, then return to their families and the easy life in China; as a result, the neighborhood around the intersection of Mott and Pell streets became known as the “bachelor society.” Inevitably, money took rather longer to accumulate than expected, and though some men did go back, Chinatown soon became a permanent settlement.

pages: 898 words: 253,177

Cadillac Desert
by Marc Reisner
Published 1 Jan 1986

In 1848, the population of San Francisco was eight hundred; three years later, thirty-five thousand people lived there. In 1853 the population went past fifty thousand and San Francisco became one of the twenty largest cities in the United States. By 1869, San Francisco possessed one of the busiest ports in the world, a huge fishing fleet, and the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad. It teemed with mansions, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and whorehouses. In finance it was the rival of New York, in culture the rival of Boston; in spirit it had no competitor. Los Angeles, meanwhile, remained a torpid, suppurating, stunted little slum. It was too far from the gold fields to receive many fortune seekers on their way in or to detach them from their fortunes on the way out.

pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers
by Maury Klein
Published 26 May 2008

Once the railroads realized the advantages offered by the new technology, telegraph wires were strung alongside railroad tracks and moved west with or sometimes ahead of the lines under construction. A federal subsidy underwrote completion of the first telegraph line to California in October 1861, nearly eight years ahead of the first transcontinental railroad. In 1866 most of the disparate telegraph companies combined into one giant firm, Western Union, through a process that foreshadowed the pattern of local and regional railroads merging into large systems. The telegraph changed the way Americans did business. Transactions that once took weeks or even months by letter could be completed in days or even hours by parties located in distant cities.

pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

One of the things that helped develop the American economy and changed the United States from a small agricultural nation to an industrial giant was an inflow of capital from Western Europe in general and from Britain in particular. These vast resources enabled the United States to build canals, factories and transcontinental railroads to tie the country together economically. As of the 1890s, for example, foreign investors owned about one-fifth of the stock of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, more than one-third of the stock of the New York Central, more than half the stock of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and nearly two-thirds of the stock of the Illinois Central.{803} Even today, when American multinational corporations own vast amounts of assets in other countries, foreigners have owned more assets in the United States than Americans owned abroad for more than a quarter of a century, beginning in 1986.

The Rough Guide to New York City
by Rough Guides
Published 21 May 2018

Brief history The first known Cantonese immigrant to New York arrived in 1858, and settled on Mott Street. He was not joined by significant numbers of his countrymen – and they were virtually all men – until the 1870s. By 1890, the census recorded about twelve thousand Chinese. Most of these men had previously worked out West on the transcontinental railroad or in gold mines, and few intended to stay in the US. Their idea was simply to make a nest egg, then return to their families and (hopefully) a far easier life in China; as a result, the neighbourhood around the intersection of Mott and Pell streets became known as the “bachelor society”.

pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
by Peter Frankopan
Published 26 Aug 2015

It is no surprise then that China was the only member of the UN Security Council not to rebuke Russia for its actions during the Ukraine crisis of 2014; the cold reality of mutually beneficial trade is far more compelling than the political brinkmanship of the west. Transport links as well as pipelines have expanded dramatically in the last three decades. Major investment in transcontinental railway lines has already opened up freight routes along the 7,000-mile Yuxinou International Railway that runs from China to a major distribution centre near Duisburg in Germany – visited by President Xi Jinping in person in 2014. Trains half a mile long have started carrying millions of laptops, shoes, clothes and other non-perishable items in one direction and electronics, car parts and medical equipment in the other on a journey that takes sixteen days – considerably faster than the sea route from China’s Pacific ports.

Cuba Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

By 1848 tramways were crisscrossing the streets of Havana, before any European city outside of Paris. Until the beginning of the 20th century, 80% of Cuban railways were associated with the sugar industry. It wasn’t until 1902 that the west–east passenger network was joined for the first time by US-Canadian railway magnate William Van Horne (builder of the first Canadian transcontinental railway), creating a line that stretched 1100km from Guane in Pinar del Río province to Guantánamo in the east. After the Revolution and the US trade embargo that ensued, Cuba’s once ground-breaking rail network struggled to find new rolling stock and fuel. Most of what you see today is borrowed from ‘friendly’ countries such as Britain, Canada, Mexico and, more recently, China.

pages: 1,037 words: 294,916

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Mar 2009

Barry’s father, Baron, was a dude with perfumed hair who was kicked out of the Prescott, Arizona, mayoralty for expanding the reach of the government too much. Barry’s uncle Morris was the future senator’s political role model—a states’ rights advocate who founded the Arizona Democratic Party, got himself reelected mayor of Prescott nine times, paved her streets, founded her militia and fire brigade, and lobbied to bring a transcontinental railroad spur through town. His own man, he boldly kept his father’s Jewish identity though his brother Baron converted to Episcopalianism. Barry’s mother, Josephine, descended from Puritan dissenter Roger Williams, was a tuberculosis patient (“lunger”) sent to Arizona to be rehabilitated in the hot, dry air who recovered to become an outdoorswoman who slept with a loaded revolver under her pillow, and raised her children on camping trips deep into the desert wilderness, and trooped them off to the Phoenix Indian School every morning to salute the flag as it was raised.

The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970
by John Darwin
Published 23 Sep 2009

Mouat, ‘Situating Vancouver Island in the British World, 1846–49’, BC Studies, 145 (2005), 25. 4. Thus the powerful voice of the railway promoter Edward Watkin in 1861 proclaimed Canada's future as ‘a great British nation…extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific’. A. A. Den Otter, The Philosophy of Railways: The Transcontinental Railway Ideal in British North America (Toronto, 1997), p. 113. 5. An idea most fully developed in J. A. Froude, Oceana (1887). 6. That it sold 80,000 copies in its first three years may be an indication of this. See J. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 342. 7.

pages: 1,106 words: 335,322

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1997

By stimulating technological innovation and standardized products, it ushered in a more regimented economy. The world of small farmers and businessmen began to fade, upstaged by a gargantuan new world of mass consumption and production. As railroad expansion gained momentum, populating the West and culminating in completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, it spawned an accompanying mania in land deals, stock promotions, and mining developments. People rushed to exploit millions of acres of natural resources that could be economically brought to market for the first time. In short, by the end of the Civil War, the preconditions existed for an industrial economy of spectacular new proportions.

Eastern USA
by Lonely Planet

Central America
by Carolyn McCarthy , Greg Benchwick , Joshua Samuel Brown , Alex Egerton , Matthew Firestone , Kevin Raub , Tom Spurling and Lucas Vidgen
Published 2 Jan 2001

COLÓN pop 45,000 With its colonial grandeur crumbling and its neighborhoods marginalized, historical Colón is sadly the city that Panama forgot, in spite of vigorous renovations underway in isolated sectors to court Caribbean cruise ships. Prior to 1869, the railroad connecting Panama City and Colón was the only rapid transit across the continental western hemisphere. However, the establishment of the US transcontinental railroad put Colón out of business almost overnight. The last whiff of prosperity was seen during the construction of the Panama Canal. In an attempt to revive the city, the Zona Libre (Free Zone) was created on the edge of Colón in 1948. Today, it’s the largest free-trade zone in the Americas. Unfortunately, none of the US$10 billion in annual commercial turnover seems to get beyond the compound’s walls and the Zona Libre exists as an island of materialism floating in a sea of unemployment, poverty and crime.

pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

A gangly teenager, Sidney went west to Omaha, Nebraska, to join his maternal grandfather George Homan in his livery-stable business.3 The year was 1867; Omaha a settlement consisting mainly of a collection of wooden shacks. Since its days as a trail-outfitting center for westbound prospectors during the Gold Rush, Omaha supplied the staples to pioneers—gambling, women, and booze.4 But with the end of the Civil War, it was about to be transformed. A grand transcontinental railroad would link the coasts of the newly reunited states for the first time, and Abraham Lincoln himself decreed that Omaha would be the railroad’s headquarters. The coming of the Union Pacific filled the town with a bustling commercial spirit, as well as a sense of destiny. Nonetheless, the place retained its reputation as the Sodom of a pious state,5 and a well-known “rogue’s rookery.”

pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans
by David Abulafia
Published 2 Oct 2019

The same waves wash the moles of the new-built California towns but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.3 After the United States acquired California from Mexico in 1848, American interest in the Pacific grew further; but a transcontinental railway was still a dream, and it was far easier to send Asian goods to New York by way of Mexico or the isthmus of Panama than across the Rocky Mountains and through the large expanses inhabited by native Americans. On the other hand, rumour had it that Japan was rich in coal, and naval strategists could see that it was vital to create coaling stations around the globe now that the steamship was coming into its own, as Great Britain had managed to do in Mindelo and elsewhere.

pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed.
by Patricia Schultz
Published 13 May 2007

Although pioneers quipped it was “too thick to drink, but too thin to plow,” 400,000 people between 1840 and the 1860s found its combination of water, hard riverbanks, and nearly flat terrain made a natural “highway” for travel along the Oregon Trail, California Trail, and Mormon Trail, along with the Pony Express, the overland stage route, and the transcontinental railroad. The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument brings the experience to life with narrated dioramas, moving lights, and thunder—kitschy but fascinating exhibits that show how our predecessors piled all their belongings into wagons and handcarts and walked across the country following that most powerful of instincts—hope.