Abstract
Focusing on the field sciences during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper analyzes how railroads served as tools of knowledge empire in the American West. The political economy of this region, shaped by the rise of Populism and capitalist development with federal and state government support, provided the context for cooperation between field scientists and railroad companies. Early on, the displacement of American Indians and their concentration on reservations was intertwined with the research of the Bureau of Ethnology under John Wesley Powell. Later, railroad companies became important patrons of field research, primarily through their provision of free or reduced-fare passes for travel. This research ranged from state universities undertaking research in horticulture and irrigation engineering to metropolitan natural history museums whose field work in paleontology had cultural or symbolic value.
Highlights
Ao analisar pesquisas de campo realizadas no final do século XIX e início do XX, o artigo mostra como as estradas de ferro foram instrumentos do império dos conhecimentos no Oeste dos Estados Unidos
As for conventional economic enterprises operating within the vast global geography of the natural world, the technologies that facilitate how material things and information move around – the railroad, the telegraph, the postal service – are crucial
The same could be said for expanding knowledge empires, in the American West and elsewhere
Summary
Ao analisar pesquisas de campo realizadas no final do século XIX e início do XX, o artigo mostra como as estradas de ferro foram instrumentos do império dos conhecimentos no Oeste dos Estados Unidos. While Holdrege’s company and several other railroads invested directly in their own experimental farms and indirectly in the research of dry-farming promoters such as Hardy Webster Campbell, they supported the work of a wide variety of field scientists in the region to produce knowledge across the spectrum of disciplines, from the practical agricultural sciences to those, such as paleontology, that offered more symbolic or cultural resources.
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