Views

Views are interpretive historical representations which move toward the recovery of a style of visual argument for history. Each View contains information pulled from documents, databases, and historical sources and each seeks to demonstrate the social effects of the development of the railroad network over time. We will assemble here animated charts, graphs, movies, and historical GIS files for comparison and analysis.

  • Southern Railroads and Freight Traffic

    Southern antebellum railroads have been characterized as limited in their impact. By the 1850s, however, many southern roads were doing brisk business both up and down their lines. The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, for example, carried a range of products in its Eastward and Westward Freight Traffic, 1855-56, reported in its annual report. 

  • Technology and The Expansion of the U.S. South

    Railroads and telegraphs changed the ways white southerners thought about their region. These technologies altered the landscape of the South, linked cities and sub-regions into a rapidly expanding network, and brought the majority of white southerners into close access of the railroads. The modernizing influences of these developments came hand-in-hand with the expansion of slavery in the 1850s. White southerners increasingly saw their region as advanced, modern, and technologically sophisticated. Their adaptation of slavery to railroad construction and operation only encouraged a sense of confidence about the progress.

  • The Atlanta Campaign of 1864

    The campaign for Atlanta was fought on the Western and Atlantic railroad line between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Atlanta over the summer of 1864. When Atlanta fell to the Union Army commanded by William T. Sherman, the course of the Civil War shifted. General Ulysses S. Grant ordered Sherman to "to move against Johnston's army, to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources. . . ." Sherman's railroad campaign set out to master the South's landscape and control the region's network of communication and transportation. To accomplish this objective Sherman and his commanders needed geographic vision.