Transcontinental Railroad Research Articles

Capsule endoscopy features of human immunodeficiency virus and geographical diseases.

In the 1860s a golden spike was driven near Ogden, Utah, marking the completion of the American transcontinental railroad bridging East and West Coasts. This seminal event in American history opened up a new era of exploration and discovery, leading to a whole new appreciation of the continent. Capsule enteroscopy has now effectively bridged the void in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract between the maximum depth of insertion of the push enteroscope and the proximal advancement of the colonoscope. Just as multiple new disease entities and new manifestations of established ones were made at the time of the wide spread availability of endoscopy, so too newer diseases and newer manifestations of well-described diseases are now possible with the advent of capsule enteroscopy. Small bowel manifestations of classical diseases were largely described based on information gained at surgery, autopsy, or contrast radiography. Because so few patients with small bowel diseases are definitely visualized, one’s understanding of these diseases is based on the most glaring complications of far-advanced disease. Capsule enteroscopy enables us to visualize and describe earlier and atypical manifestations of these diseases (Figs. 1–7). HIV and AIDS is clearly a global problem infecting probably 100 million individuals around the globe. Even the recently described GI manifestations of AIDS needs to be extended and amplified now in the era of capsule enteroscopy. In addition to the enteric manifestations of HIV disease, now readily available for observational diagnosis by capsule endoscopy, certain diseases unique to particular regions of the globe are being discovered by capsule enteroscopy (see

Changing Role of the Civil Engineer in Society

The engineer in America, the legitimate child of the epochal wedding of science to the useful arts, was the human medium through which it would work its profound social transformation. He was, as engineers themselves tirelessly boasted, a new breed of man, the link between ‘the monastery of science and the secular world of business,’ whose calling, engineering, bridged ‘the gulf between the impersonal exact sciences and the more human and personal affairs of economics and sociology.’ Each morning Americans rush about their business, thinking much about the ticking clock and perhaps very little about the bridges they cross, the roads they travel, the height and girth of the towers that house their offices. Infrastructure and morning coffee are assumed rather than cherished. One does not pause to ponder structural theories or the technology of reinforced concrete. Rather, we fret and complain that traffic is too heavy, there are too few lanes, or the long ascent to the 60th floor will shave critical minutes off an important meeting. Even in structural tragedy, our first reaction may be sympathy or criticism for the architect rather than for the engineer behind the structure. As new technologies have emerged, the civil engineer has become transparent—his or her work acknowledged only by a small plaque or the occasional documentary. The rise of the United States, however, is inextricably linked to the aspirations and successes of the civil engineer, and at one time the engineer was heralded as both hero and civilizer of lands stretching as far as the Pacific. Traditionally male, he became the new romantic adventurer, both a revolutionary and ethical figure, a welcome alternative to the prototypical industrialist or financier. He was a symbol of optimism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, devising bigger, taller, and more expansive structures than ever dreamed possible. He was at once scientist, artist, and soldier of an untamed land. In the mid-19th century, territorial growth and Manifest Destiny ushered in the golden age of technology and its ‘‘lusty issue was engineering.’’ The first surge occurred when Congress authorized western expansion through the construction of the transcontinental railroad in 1866. Several decades later, U.S. involvement in the construction of the Panama Canal allowed American engineers to participate in perhaps one of the greatest feats of engineering in modern times. Science truly merged with art, however, when John Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883. A quintessential American immigrant, Roebling’s dream of structural strength and elegance was realized in a bridge that in his own words ‘‘...will be ranked as national monuments,’’ and

Transcontinental Railroad. Prod. by Mark Zwonitzer. HiddenHill Productions for American Experience, 2003. 120 mins.

Transcontinental Railroad. Prod. by Mark Zwonitzer. HiddenHill Productions for American Experience, 2003. 120 mins.

Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age

Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age

From Impact to Riches: Evolution of Geological Understanding as Seen at Sudbury, Canada

investigation shows that it contains magnetic iron ore and magnetic iron pyrites generally disseminated throughout the rock, the former in very small grains: titaniferous iron was found associated with the magnetic ore, and a small quantity of nickel and copper with the pyrites. These remarks were not followed up. It was only after sulfides were revealed in a new railway cutting in 1883 as a result of the building of Canada’s first transcontinental railroad, the Canadian Pacific, that a prospecting and staking rush started in the area. The first production at Sudbury occurred in 1886 (Fig. 1). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, laterites in New Caledonia satisfied the majority of the world’s demand for nickel, but by 1905 the sulfide mines at Sudbury had overtaken New Caledonia as the

Railroading America

This article studies the material production and consumption of the national community in 19th-century America. More particularly, it concentrates on the intersection between particular technologies of transportation, representation and dissemination in the spatial and imaginary formation of the American nation in the 1860s. Through an analysis of the contradictory mechanism of placement and displacement, identity and difference at the heart of a particular state-sanctioned field of national production the construction of America's first transcontinental railroad in 19th-century California the essay highlights what tends to remain hidden in narrowly defined `cultural' (textual) approaches to nationhood: its involvement in racial, gendered and class-related divisions between private and public space, home and travel, labour and capital, technology and nature.

Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad

Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad

"Are We Chimerical in this Opinion?" Visions of a Pacific Railroad and Westward Expansion before 1845

Although he deserves credit for promoting a transcontinental railroad as early as 1845, Asa Whitney may better represent the culmination of a discourse that had begun over twenty years earlier. Visions of a Pacific railroad originated in the 1820s and evolved into a widely debated issue by the 1830s. From the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, early promoters not only envisioned railroads to Oregon but also into the Mexican provinces of California and Sonora—suggesting that such visions represented an important element of U.S. expansionism. Relying on romantically charged language, advocates ignored geographical and political realities and wedded their vision with a faith in railroad technology that was yet in its infancy. Wishing to lay claim to the perceived riches of the Asian trade, advocates described the Pacific railroad as a commercial venture, preceding actual settlement. Northerners generally promoted routes to Oregon, while the South sought California and Sonora as destinations, but these contending visions should not be confused with the sectionalism that characterized the debates over the railroad during the 1850s. Instead, the differences present in the discourse of the 1830s largely reflect civic boosterism. While scholars have noted these earlier visionaries, this article analyzes their ideas and places them in the context of U.S. expansion to the Pacific.

“Settling Down” in Western Nebraska: Grounding Local History Through Memoir

“S e t t l in g D o w n ” in W e s t e r n N e b r a s k a : G r o u n d in g L o c a l H is t o r y t h r o u g h M e m o ir C h a r l o t t e H o g g All history is ultimately local and personal. To tell what we remember, and to keep on telling it, is to keep the past alive in the present. — Paul Gruchow, Grass Roots T r a v e l a n d S e t t l e m e n t : A Me m o i r o f P l a c e Without the railroad, it’s unlikely my hometown of Paxton, Nebraska (population approximately five hundred), would have existed at all. In Union Pacific: The Building of the First Transcontinental Railroad, Garry Hogg writes that when the Central and Union Pacific Railroads were selecting the trail for building the first transcontinental railroad in the early 1860s, they ultimately followed President Lincoln’s advice “that the most practicable route for their railway was along the Platte Valley” (43). Following the course of the Platte River, the Oregon Trail, the Pony Express, and then the Union Pacific Railroad all enveloped the area that later became my hometown. Paxton is nestled between the North and South Platte Rivers that converge east of town. To the south are the Sandhills, the expanse of dunes— twenty thousand square miles— considered some of the best cattle country in the world. The town itself is one mile from Inter­ state 80, which, like the first transcontinental highway, Lincoln Highway, largely follows the Platte River valley. When I pull off the ramp, I see the town cemetery to the south, then drive the mile into town. Crossing the tracks I see the town depot, the same one used by Edward Searle, who founded the town in 1867.1learned— from a text found in the Paxton library composed by Fae Christensen, who lived her whole life in and around the town— that Searle, a telegraph operator, came during the rush to build the railroad through Nebraska, that the town was first a depot station along the transcontinental railroad route. Within a year the Union Pacific men had “surveyed, graded, and laid” track through the state of Nebraska (Garry Hogg 56). As spikers were laying track on the Union Pacific between Ogallala and Julesburg, Colorado, eighteen-year-old Searle was hired as a telegraph operator 2 2 4 WAL 3 7 . 2 S u m m e r 2 0 0 2 and later promoted to depot agent (Christensen, “How Old Is Paxton?” 1). The depot, though it now sits perpendicular rather than parallel to the tracks is the same building Searle worked in over 125 years ago. From anywhere in town I can hear the trains coming through; when I moved away to college I had trouble sleeping, unable to hear a whistle or feel the slightest tremor in my bed from the Union Pacific trains. iin In 1982, my parents moved from Fargo, North Dakota, to Paxton after a sudden job loss, simply because they weren’t sure where else to go, and my brother and I had to be enrolled in school. My grandma told her son, my dad, “Come home for now.” When we got to town, it was as if everyone was waiting. Mom took us to school, where the principal said, “You’re Jack’s kids? You’ll do well, then.” Down at Hehnke’s Grocery Store, Henry welcomed us, embraced my dad. To me it wasn’t a home­ coming, despite how excited I was to be near my grandma and aunt, who lived two doors away from each other. This wasn’t our first move. In the past few years, I had lived in Minnesota and both of the Dakotas; I was tired of moving. Yet here it was different. Everything around me was both familiar and not. I carried with me the legacy of four generations of Osborns...

Pursuing "The Things of This World": Mormon Resistance and Assimilation as Seen in the Furniture of the Brigham City Cooperative, 1874-88

In response to the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, Mormon leaders in Utah began a campaign of resistance rhetoric promoting self-sufficiency to maintain cultural isolation. Their response included establishing cooperative economic schemes and promoting the consumption of locally made products to assert religious loyalty. Within this atmosphere, the Brigham City cooperative (founded in 1864) established a Cabinet Making Shop in 1874 as a response to the increasing availability of imported eastern furniture. The documents and furniture of the Cabinet Making Shop show that, despite the initial enthusiasm to resist eastern encroachment, cooperative craftsmen and customers were influenced by popular fashions in the East.

Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869

The Union had won the Civil War and abolished slavery. However, Lincoln, an early champion of railroads, would not live to see the next great achievment. The governmentpitted the Union Pacific against the Central Pacific in a race that encouraged speed over caution. Locomotives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the east through Panama, around South America, or lugged across country. The railroad was the last great building project to be done by hand. The brave men who built the American Transcontinental Railroad between 1865 and 1869 came from China, Ireland and the defeated South.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline's Twentieth Birthday: Commemoration, Celebration, and the Taming of the Silver Snake

The challenges, pitfalls and pleasures of devoting museum exhibits to sensitive subjects in often highly politicized cultural environments became a staple of discussion in the literature of public history during the 1990s. Moving away from the more familiar ground of race, class, and gender to the terrain of technology, this essay discusses the politics of commemoration with reference to a massive engineering project of comparative youth. In 1997/98, the Smithsonian mounted a six-month exhibit to mark the twentieth anniversary of the completion of one of the most celebrated - and controversial - engineering projects in U.S. history. Stimulated by a visit to the pipeline exhibit, this essay examines its context, content, character, and reception. It also ponders some of the broader implications of commemorative acts that elevate contested items of material culture into seductive icons of heritage. How, when - and where - should we commemorate a technological `wonder' that, in 2001, is still far from obsolete, but is ultimately slated for removal at the end of its working days? Is a museum in fact the most effective place to remember a project of such grand scale that it prompted analogies with the transcontinental railroads, Panama Canal, and Great Wall of China?

Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad

Journal Article Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad Get access Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. By Bain David Haward. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999. xiii + 797 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.) Gordon Chappell Gordon Chappell National Park Service, San Francisco Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 32, Issue 1, Spring 2001, Page 105, https://doi.org/10.2307/3650863 Published: 01 February 2001

Many Generations, Few Improvements: “Americans” Challenge Navajos on the Transcontinental Railroad Grant, Arizona, 1881–1887

Between 1863 and 1868, the US Army waged a war on the Navajo people that ended in the Army holding perhaps half of all Navajos at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The Navajo homelands before this time extended from southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado across northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. Fort Sumner was hundreds of miles to the east. In 1868, a dozen Navajo headmen inscribed their Xes on a treaty with the US Army, which set aside a reservation in the middle of their much larger traditional homeland. Released from captivity, the Navajos gravitated to their former homes, including those off the reservation. Other tribal members who escaped the Fort Sumner entrapment also resettled in their homeland. 2 But things were different than they were before the forced march. The Navajos were to be governed from Fort Defiance, located near the new reservation's southern boundary, by military authorities temporarily and by civilian authorities ultimately. The Navajos were to receive rations at Fort Defiance, so many settled nearby, at least until they could restore their sheep herds. In 1866 Congress set aside a swath of land south of the treaty reservation for a transcontinental railroad that would travel through the middle of the Navajos' traditional homeland. The grant, alternate square-mile sections in a corridor soon expanded to 100 miles wide, was supposed to generate funds to finance railroad construction. 3 . Les AA. examinent les relations coloniales entre les Amerindiens navajo et les colons americains dans la partie la plus violente de la concession ferroviere jouxtant la nouvelle reserve navajo etablie par traite apres la deportation de la Longue Marche, la partie situee au sud de la moitie occidentale de la reserve : le Chambers Checkerboard. Ils decrivent et expliquent les conflits entre Amerindiens et Americains, mettant en evidence les convergences et divergences d'interets entre les differents segments de la population : Amerindiens, colons eleveurs, marchands, militaires, et gouvernement civil. Ils mettent notamment en evidence le role des marchands coloniaux dans la creation et le maintien des reserves. D'une part, ils montrent comment les colons americains voulaient exclure les Navajo de ce territoire dans le contexte de l'introduction des premiers elements du capitalisme industriel de la frontiere. D'autre part, ils montrent comment les conflits locaux etaient relies aux enjeux nationaux du pouvoir colonial.

Nothing like it in the world: the men who built the transcontinental railroad, 1863-1869

Nothing like it in the world: the men who built the transcontinental railroad, 1863-1869

Estimation of cost effects for potential trans-continental railroad mergers

Following the movement toward deregulation of the transportation industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the industry experienced a series of mergers. One of the primary claims with regard to merger proposals was that the industry was characterized by significant economies of scale, scope, and density that could be extracted by the larger firms. This paper examines the effects on railroad costs of four potential transcontinental railroad mergers. Using a translog functional form, a cost function is estimated for a sample of railroads. The cost model is then simulated using the traffic data from each of the actual and (by summation) merged firms to estimate what the firms' costs might be were such combinations to obtain. The hypothetical costs of the merged firms are examined in order to evaluate the efficiency effects of the mergers.

Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad

After the Civil War, the building of the transcontinental railroad was the nineteenth century's most transformative event. Beginning in 1842 with a visionary's dream to span the continent with twin bands of iron, Empire Express captures three dramatic decades in which the United States effectively doubled in size, fought three wars, and began to discover a new national identity. From self--made entrepreneurs such as the Union Pacific's Thomas Durant and era--defining figures such as President Lincoln to the thousands of laborers whose backbreaking work made the railroad possible, this extraordinary narrative summons an astonishing array of voices to give new dimension not only to this epic endeavor but also to the culture, political struggles, and social conflicts of an unforgettable period in American history.

The shifting audience of the university museum

Faced with uncertainties of funding and the need to rely on increasing support from without the academic community, university museums in the United States are at risk of compromising their traditional mission of investigation, inquiry and challenge, according to Glenn Willumson. Yet the need for them to reassert their intellectual vigour and remain in the forefront of interdisciplinary dialogue has never been greater. The author holds a Ph.D. in art history and is currently curator of the Palmer Museum of Art, on Pennsylvania State University campus. He previously taught at the University of California and has served as a specialist in photography and American art at the Getty Research Institute. He has published extensively in American art and in the history of photography and is working on a book and exhibition project that considers the representation of the Western landscape and the first American transcontinental railroad. The recipient of numerous research awards, he has served on the editorial board of Cambridge University Press, the governing board of the Society for Photographic Education, and is a former advisor to History of Photography magazine.

The Journey to Find the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings: Keynote Speech to the Sixth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 13, 1999

The Journey to Find the 1869 Cincinnati Red StockingsKeynote Speech to the Sixth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 13, 1999 Daryl Brock (bio) In the summer of 1985 I set out on a two-month, 12,000-mile odyssey around the U.S. following the tour routes of the 1969 Cincinnati Red Stockings. My intention was to visit the twenty-six cities and towns where they played. I managed to get to all but Fort Wayne, which still remains on my to-do list. Why was I doing this in the first place? Well, it began with my reading Douglas Wallop's Baseball: An Informal History. Wallop, you may remember, wrote The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the Broadway hit "Damn Yankees." I was intrigued by Wallop's charming descriptions of the first ballplayers to come out in the open and say they were playing a boy's game for money. Their salaries were guaranteed by contracts, and the amounts were even published in newspapers. (By the way, the day after tomorrow, Monday, is the 130th anniversary of the start of those contracts: March 15th, 1869; they ran eight months, expiring on November 15th.) Wallop recounted how opponents called player-manager Harry Wright a "bearded boy in bloomers" and "captain of the bloody calves" because of the team's new knickerbocker-style uniform. Wallop also told of them riding across plains and prairies to play in San Francisco—which meant they had ridden the new transcontinental railroad in the very first months of its existence. Who were those guys? I wondered. What was it like to be a twenty-two-year-old playing baseball only four years after the end of the Civil War and seven years before the Custer massacre, when the West was still wild? What was society like? What was baseball like? This was hardly a new pattern. As a boy I would read, say, Robin Hood and then probe its "reality" by delving into a general history or perhaps a biography of Richard the Lion-Hearted. In college I was a double major—literature and history—and taught those subjects later along with psychology—the very elements of novel making. By spring of 1985 I had done enough research on post-Civil War matters to become fascinated by them and also to realize that little in the way of commercial entertainment had employed that era as a setting. Most of it had been focused [End Page 23] in the South, such as KKK-related stories during Reconstruction. Nothing had been set in the North except the old TV program "Wild Wild West," which I think took place during Grant's second administration. The year 1869 seemed a fabulous backdrop for some kind of story. Consequently, on Sunday, May 5th, 1985, I prepared to set out from Seattle, where my wife, Lura, was then employed as an actress. We loaded gear into my truck—Lura had purchased a camper shell as a setting-out gift. Is she a great wife, or what?—and in jumped our beagle-mix, Missy. The scouting report on Missy read: "Best position shortstop. Great natural instincts, speed, and range; can get her teeth around almost anything ever turned out at the Louisville bat factory." She would be my traveling companion in the weeks to come. We left Seattle at 6 A.M. and set out across the Cascades, passing through Ritzville and St. Regis and Saltese; through Spokane and Couer d'Alene and Missoula. By nightfall we'd gone 704 miles and found a KOA campground to our liking outside of Bozeman Hot Springs, Montana. Next morning I breakfasted at theCowboy Café in downtown Bozeman, where I caught snippets of dialogue (more accurately, intersecting monologues) that went: "Hey, Craig . . . [long silence] . . . Ah sold thet roll a bob wahr. . . ." and the uninflected response: " . . . Huh . . ."On the TV in the corner was coverage of historians combing the Little Bighorn site with metal detectors, attempting to track the 1876 battlefield movements by means of ballistic tests on shell casings. The commentary in the Cowboy Café went: "Why the hell they wanna spend money finding out what happened to Custer? He...

Mark Twain, Westward Expansion, Immigrant Unrest: Baseball and American Growing Pains in Darryl Brock's If I Never Get Back

Mark Twain, Westward Expansion, Immigrant UnrestBaseball and American Growing Pains in Darryl Brock's If I Never Get Back Peter Carino (bio) Darryl Brock's If I Never Get Back recounts the time traveling adventure of Sam Fowler, a recently divorced and down-on-his-luck San Francisco newspaperman with a degree of athletic talent who awakens in 1896 to become a member of the Cincinnati Red Stockings, baseball's first professional team. But the novel is far more than a baseball adventure tale. Like Mark Twain's Hank Morgan of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Sam initially brings a naive condescension to the past before becoming enmeshed in the richness and complexity of private, public, and political life in 1896. Upon his return to the present, Sam is a chastened, wiser, and more loving man. Sam's adventures are driven by the chaotic energy of post-Civil War America. In the course of his season with the Red Stockings, Sam befriends Mark Twain, takes the transcontinental railroad west to San Francisco, is ensnared in a political plot hatched by the Fenian Brotherhood to invade Canada and ransom it for Irish freedom, and falls in love with a young Fenian widow, Cait Leonard. He then discovers that his twentieth-century life may be a reincarnation of that of her husband, Colm, who was murdered in the Civil War by his supposed best friend, a Fenian leader and secret rival for Cait's affections. Mixing fantasy and historical fact, this episodic plot generates a panorama of an America in flux, an America looking for an identity but moving too fast to fix on one. Baseball is a part of this identity, as the Red Stockings become some of the nation's first popular culture celebrities. Yet, as a professional enterprise, the team also reflects the growing pains of a nation moving from its Anglo-centric and agrarian roots to expansionism, economic competition, and multicultural strife. Brock's rendering of nineteenth-century baseball both reflects and is informed by the instability of the times, and against this backdrop, his protagonist's development demonstrates the malleability of individual and cultural identity in the United States. [End Page 83] Blacking out on a twentieth-century Amtrak platform on his way back west from his father's funeral in Cleveland, Sam finds himself on a train with the famous "base ballists," as they call themselves, and becomes fast friends with the team's left fielder, Andy Leonard, the Huck Finn-like brother of Cait. Acclimating himself to his trip through time, Sam, as would be expected, feels a pronounced sense of dislocation, wondering, "Was my old body back on that station dock? . . . There must be a rationale to all this, a purpose. If I looked for clues surely I'd figure it out. But the whole thing was scary, like plunging into a void. Even with Andy's help, how was I going to cope?"1 Sam's sense of temporal dislocation, while an expected part of the time travel plot, parallels Brock's portrayal of the post-Civil War nation in change. The various locales the Red Stockings visit, as well as their home city of Cincinnati, constitute an unstable melange of rural past and urban aspiration. In Rochester, on the way to a match with the Troy Haymakers, Sam admires the still green channel of the Genesee River but is assaulted by the dust in the air and the roar of heavy machinery coming from the flour mills. He notes the bustling docks and barges that signal the river's impending transformation from pastoral landscape to commercial waterway and, passing the new brick streets of the business district, he recoils from "garbage [that] lay in stinking heaps before buildings, hogs and chickens picking through it" (p. 33). Similarly, on the sidewalks of New York with Mark Twain, after meeting the author on a train, Sam contrasts the gray stone facade, steam-powered elevator, gas chandelier, and plush carpeting of the Astor House with streets reeking of horse manure and markets "hung [with] meat and poultry crawling with flies" (p. 115). One of his strongest senses of culture shock comes...