Views

Views are short interpretive historical presentations from materials in the Railroads collection. Each View is aimed a research question or problem and assembles information from multiple sources: documents, lists, records, orginal maps, and other historical sources. Rather than using traditional footnotes or citations, these Views contain direct links and references to relevant sources used in their assembly. Views are "assemblages" of data and interpretation and should be considered multimedia experiments in the presentation of digital history.

  • William Jennings Bryan's Railroad Campaign in 1896

    In the 1896 Presidential Campaign Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan took four major railroad trips, sometimes giving over a dozen speeches at stops along his route. We have compiled all of Bryan's speeches from newspaper sources and his personal papers. Here, using Token X you can analyze all of speeches with word searches, word clouds, and other analytical visualizations. By Nathan G. Sanderson and William G. Thomas.

  • William Jennings Bryan's 1894 U. S. Senate Campaign and American Politics

    William Jennings Bryan ran for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska in 1894 just two years before his run for the presidency at the head of the Democratic and Populist ticket. 1894 was a year of turmoil in American life, as strikes, violence, and economic depression rocked the nation. Byran's campaign was an important precursor to his national candidacy in 1896.

  • Strikes, Blacklists, and Dismissals--Railroad Workers' Spatial History on the Great Plains

    Beginning in the 1880s railroad companies began compiling blacklists of employees dismissed for cause. During the turbulent stirkes in 1886 and 1888, western railroads began sharing these lists so that an employee dismissed on one road might not be hired on another. This map represents over 1,000 Union Pacific dismissals, by their location and cause. By Leslie Working, Richard G. Healey, and William G. Thomas.