Railroads and the Making of Modern America collects and makes available a wide array of materials documenting the social effects of the railroad and the transformation of the United States to modern ideas, institutions, and practices in the nineteenth century. The project utilizes the digital medium to investigate, represent, and analyze this social change and document episodes of the railroad's social consequences. Here you will find interpretive visualizations exploring and representing the ways railroads changed understandings of space and time, the development of slavery around railroad growth in the South, the migration and settlement of railroad lands, and the political opposition to railroads around rates. Railroads is meant to act as a research and teaching platform to test hypotheses, to create visualizations of complex processes, and to inspire scholarship.
Publications:
The following scholarly work has been published with research or support from the Railroads project.
- "Places of Exchange: An Analysis of Human and Materiél Flows in Civil War Alexandria, Virginia" by William G. Thomas III, Kaci Nash, and Robert Shepard in Civil War History 62, no. 4 (2016): 359-398
- "Land and Law in the Age of Enterprise: A Legal History of Railroad Land Grants in the Pacific Northwest, 1864-1916" by Sean M. Krammer (PhD diss., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2015)
- "Railroads and Regional Labor Markets in the Mid-Nineteenth Century United States: A Case Study of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad" by Richard G. Healey, William G. Thomas, and Katie Lahman in Journal of Historical Geography 41 (July 2013): 13-32
- "The Civil War's 'Brother Artists'" by William G. Thomas and Leslie Working in New York Times, November 17, 2012
- "Been Workin' on the Railroad" by William G. Thomas in New York Times, February 10, 2012
- "Railroads and Immigration in the Northeast United States 1850-1900" by Richard G. Healey in Geography Compass 6, no. 8 (2012): 455-476
- "The Railroads Must Have Ties: Edward R. Harriman and Forest Conservation, 1901-1908" by Sean M. Kammer in Western Legal History 23, No. 1 (winner of the 2010 Jerome I. Braun Prize in Western Legal History)
- The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America by William G. Thomas (Yale University Press, 2011)
- "'Swerve Me?: The South, Railroads, and the Rush to Modernity" by William G. Thomas in The Old South's Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress, ed. by Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, April 2011)
- "Shaping Nebraska: An Analysis of Railroad Land Sales, 1870-1880" by Kurt Kinbacher and William G. Thomas in Great Plains Quarterly 28 (2008)
- "William Jennings Bryan, The Railroads, and the Politics of 'Workingmen,'" by William G. Thomas in Nebraska Law Review 86 (2007)
- "The Countryside Transformed: The Eastern Shore of Virginia, the Pennsylvania Railroads, the Creation of a Modern Landscape," by William G. Thomas, Brooks M. Barnes, and Tom Szuba, in Southern Spaces, 2007
- more...
For more analysis and research discussion, see William G. Thomas's Blog
