Unfinished Business: The Railroad in American Life by Maury Klein

Abstract

416 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ages of war, travel photography, and photography and literature. The authors do not dwell on technical details, but they do make clear the special properties of early forms of photography and the extent to which these encouraged certain social usages. Aside from a general contempt for French theorists emphatically expressed in the introduction (p. 4), I could not find any governing idea, but there are very fine illustrations, some in color. (All images are well-captioned as regards original size and technique.) Long on anecdote and short on analysis, this volume nevertheless can suggest fascinating areas for further research. A host of topics appear and then are dropped without sufficient discussion, such as the tendency of early photographers to combine their trade with dentistry, the use of carte-de-visite formats to sell luxury goods, the early appearance of collages in 1880s advertising, the invention of celebrity photographs, and the business practices of itinerant photographers. Other topics are latent but never really articulated, notably, the visual exploitation of women. The volume is particularly rich in material on the photo­ graphic profession and the social rituals of the studio, and in the hands of a cultural historian much more could be done with it. To the extent that this book has a theme, it is the complex role that photographers played in society during the first seventy-five years of the medium’s existence. Yet the systematic development of all themes is vitiated by the authors’ refusal to explore cultural differences. En­ glish, American, French, German and central European examples and anecdotes are jumbled together indiscriminately, plus the occasional item from Argentina or Russia. This potpourri escapes the narrow con­ fines ofnational histories but misses the opportunity to be comparative. Overall, the volume depicts the state of much previous photographic research, which Heinz Henisch did so much to foster as the founding editor of the journal History and Photography. His retirement and this publication mark the end of an era characterized by enterprising dis­ covery and collection, whose visible results are everywhere apparent in this handsome volume. Perhaps inevitably, it displays more breadth than analysis, while opening many avenues to future research. David E. Nye Dr. Nye is professor of American studies at Odense University. His Electrifying America: Social Meanings ofa New Technology won SHOT’s 1993 Dexter Prize. His other books include Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric (1985) and American Technological Sublime (1994). Unfinished Business: The Railroad in American Life. By Maury Klein. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994. Pp. 226; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95. Maury Klein has taken advantage of his leadership in the field of railroad history to publish Unfinished Business, a compilation of articles TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 417 and talks that have served as working papers for his research of the last twenty-six years. Covering the entire span of railroad history, from the 1820s to the present, the essays deal with specific case studies in the building and rebuilding of American railroads, focusing on the businessmen who made policy and raised money for construction. Taken together, the articles portray an author who is discontented with the state of research in railroad history and wants to sketch out some guidelines for future inquiry. While the articles were not written with reference to each other, they work together to confront the problems of early building in the 1830s, the struggle for rebuilding in the Reconstruction South, the building boom in the North and far West after the Civil War, the depression of 1893 and the subsequent need to completely reor­ ganize the railroads and rebuild them to incorporate improvements in railroad technology, the effect of regulation on the ability of Amer­ ican railroads to provide needed technological innovations, and the successes and failures in introducing replacement technology to the railroads of the 20th century. In almost every essay, Klein pinpoints those business leaders, among successive generations of railroad men, who had a key impact on the where and how of construction, and he evaluates this influ­ ence. In each instance, from the southern railroad presidents of the 1870s and E. H. Harriman at...