Download or read book Buried Dreams written by Andrew R. Black and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2020-10-14 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hoosac railroad tunnel in the mountains of northwestern Massachusetts was a nineteenth-century engineering and construction marvel, on par with the Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, and Erie Canal. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the time (4.75 miles), it took nearly twenty-five years (1851‒1875), almost two hundred casualties, and tens of millions of dollars to build. Yet it failed to deliver on its grandiose promise of economic renewal for the commonwealth, and thus is little known today. Andrew R. Black’s Buried Dreams refreshes public memory of the project, explaining how a plan of such magnitude and cost came to be in the first place, what forces sustained its completion, and the factors that inhibited its success. Black digs into the special case of Massachusetts, a state disadvantaged by nature and forced repeatedly to reinvent itself to succeed economically. The Hoosac Tunnel was just one of the state’s efforts in this cycle of decline and rejuvenation, though certainly the strangest. Black also explores the intense rivalry among Eastern Seaboard states for the spoils of western expansion in the post‒Erie Canal period. His study interweaves the lure of the West, the competition between Massachusetts and archrival New York, the railroad boom and collapse, and the shifting ground of state and national politics. The psychic makeup of Americans before and after the Civil War heavily influenced public perceptions of the tunnel; by the time it was finished, Black contends, the indomitable triumphalism that had given birth to the Hoosac had faded to skepticism and cynicism. Anticipated economic benefits never arrived, and Massachusetts eventually sold the tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a private railroad company. Buried Dreams tells a story of America’s reckoning with the perils of impractical idealism, the limits of technology to bend nature to its will, and grand endeavors untempered by humility.
Download or read book The American Postal Network 1792 1914 Vol 4 written by Richard R John and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By covering both administrative and non-administrative aspects of the postal network, this four-volume reset edition shows how this system was part of a larger network which included different modes of transport and communication (steamboats, railroads, telegraphs) as well as political parties (the Democrats, Whigs and Republicans).
Download or read book An Exemplary Whig written by David M. Gold and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-07-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have paid surprisingly little attention to state-level political leaders and judges. Edward Kent (1802–77) was both. He served three terms as a state legislator, two as mayor of Bangor, two as governor, and two as a judge of the state supreme court. He represented Maine in the negotiations that resolved the long-running northeastern border dispute between the United States and Great Britain and served for four years as the American consul in Rio de Janeiro. The foremost Whig in Maine state politics and later a Republican judge, Kent articulated classic Whig political views and carried them forward into his Whig-Republican jurisprudence. In examining Kent's career as Maine's quintessential Whig, An Exemplary Whig reveals his characteristically conservative Whig outlook, including an aversion toward disorder and a deep respect for law, for existing institutions, and for the wisdom of experience. Kent brought his conservative disposition into the Republican Party. He had no use for radical abolitionism, preferring moderation and compromise to measures that endangered social order or the integrity of the Union. Kent saw the "slave power," not abolitionism, as the disrupter of the Union, and he urged the “fusion” of all antislavery elements into a new Republican party. In 1859, Maine's Republican governor appointed Kent to the state supreme court. During his fourteen-year tenure, Kent adopted a Whiggish jurisprudence, pragmatic and commonsensical, and displayed a reverence for the common law and a distrust of “theoretic speculation.” After his retirement, he chaired a constitutional revision commission, admonishing his fellow commissioners to bear in mind the “practical wisdom” that kept dangerous innovation in check. As a politician during the Jacksonian era, Kent exemplified Whig leadership at the local and state levels. In his jurisprudence, he carried the Whig persuasion into the Republican ascendancy and the beginnings of the Gilded Age.
Download or read book Portrait of a Port written by W. H. Bunting and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrait Of A Port is a classic portrayal of Boston's glorious maritime past opens a window onto the history of American port cities.
Download or read book Close Ties written by Ken Cruikshank and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1991 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the historic controversies surrounding freight rates, Close Ties explores the ways in which Canadians tried to regulate the nation's first big business, the railways. Ken Cruikshank challenges earlier interpretations, concluding that the history of railway regulation in Canada is not a story of powerful business corporations using governments to subvert the people's interests, nor a tale of righteous people overcoming robber barons. Instead, he presents a more complex and engaging account of how governments tried to accommodate the equally selfish demands of divergent and conflicting interests in a competitive economy.
Download or read book The New Urban History written by Leo Francis Schnore and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As part of the new consciousness concerning the history of the American city, younger historians, economists, and geographers working with quantitative methods on urban-historical problems were brought together at a conference sponsored by the History Advisory Committee of the Mathematical Social Science Board. The papers in this volume, products of the conference, represent the pioneer stage of quantitative exploration in United States urban history. United by a common concern with the growth of cities in society and the effects of growth on the internal organization and related social order of cities, the papers deal with such topics as jobs, residences, neighborhoods, adjustment, status, accommodation, innovation, and location. The authors attempt to measure some of the attitudes and behavior of capitalists, workers, immigrants, and freedmen, and speculate on the ways in which households, firms, and assorted social groupings cope with changing physical and social environments. The essays demonstrate the productive use of quantitative research techniques, ranging from simple enumeration of data in tabular form to sophisticated types of statistical hypothesis- testing and mathematical modeling. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Roots of American Industrialization written by David R. Meyer and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-05-21 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Farms that were on poor soil and distant from markets declined, whereas other farms successfully adjusted production as rural and urban markets expanded and as Midwestern agricultural products flowed eastward after 1840. Rural and urban demand for manufactures in the East supported diverse industrial development and prosperous rural areas and burgeoning cities supplied increasing amounts of capital for investment.
Download or read book Management written by and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Ordeal of the Reunion written by Mark Wahlgren Summers and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-10-27 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a generation, scholarship on the Reconstruction era has rightly focused on the struggles of the recently emancipated for a meaningful freedom and defined its success or failure largely in those terms. In The Ordeal of the Reunion, Mark Wahlgren Summers goes beyond this vitally important question, focusing on Reconstruction's need to form an enduring Union without sacrificing the framework of federalism and republican democracy. Assessing the era nationally, Summers emphasizes the variety of conservative strains that confined the scope of change, highlights the war's impact and its aftermath, and brings the West and foreign policy into an integrated narrative. In sum, this book offers a fresh explanation for Reconstruction's demise and a case for its essential successes as well as its great failures. Indeed, this book demonstrates the extent to which the victors' aims in 1865 were met--and at what cost. Summers depicts not just a heroic, tragic moment with equal rights advanced and then betrayed but a time of achievement and consolidation, in which nationhood and emancipation were placed beyond repeal and the groundwork was laid for a stronger, if not better, America to come.
Download or read book Woolf and the City written by Elizabeth F. Evans and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited collection from acclaimed contemporary Woolf scholars, focusing on urban issues. These include addressing the ethical and political implications of Virginia Woolf’s work, a move that suggests new insights into Woolf as a “real world” social critic.
Download or read book New York City written by Best Books on and published by Best Books on. This book was released on 1939 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Enterprising Elite written by Robert F. Dalzell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than any other single group of individuals, the Boston Associates were responsible for the sweeping economic transformation that occurred in New England between 1815 and 1861. Through the use of the corporate form, they established an extensive network of modern business enterprises that were among the largest of the time. Their most notable achievement was the development of the Waltham-Lowell system in the textile industry, but they were also active in transportation, banking, and insurance, and at the same time played a major role in philanthropy and politics. Evaluating each of these efforts in turn and placing the Associates in the context of the society and culture that produced them, the author convincingly explains the complex motives that led the group to undertake initiatives on so many different fronts. Dalzell shows that men like Francis Cabot Lowell, Nathan Appleton, and Amos and Abbott Lawrence are best understood as transitional figures. Although they used modern methods when it suited their interest, they were most concerned with protecting the positions they had already won at the top of a traditional social order. Thus, for all the innovations they sponsored, their commitment to change remained both partial and highly selective. And while something very like an industrial revolution did occur in New England during the nineteenth century, paradoxically the Associates neither sought nor welcomed it. On the contrary, as time passed they became increasingly preoccupied with combating the forces of change. In addition to the light it sheds on a crucial chapter of business history, this gracefully written study offers fresh insights into the role and attitudes of elites during the period. Furthermore it contradicts some of the prevailing thought about entrepreneurial behavior in the early phases of industrialization in America.
Download or read book A Tale of Three Cities written by John Lynch and published by Springer. This book was released on 1998-07-13 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The city of Belfast tends to be discussed in terms of its distinctiveness from the rest of Ireland, an industrial city in an agricultural country. However, when compared with another 'British' industrial port such as Bristol it is the similarities rather than the differences that are surprising. When these cities are compared with Dublin, the contrasts become even more painfully evident. This book seeks to explore these contrasting urban centres at the start of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Women s Issues in Transportation written by Susan Herbel and published by Transportation Research Board. This book was released on 2010 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "September 27-30, 2009. Irvine, California"--Title page.
Download or read book Reliability and Statistics in Transportation and Communication written by Igor Kabashkin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-09 with total page 823 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reports on cutting-edge theories and methods for analyzing complex systems, such as transportation and communication networks and discusses multi-disciplinary approaches to dependability problems encountered when dealing with complex systems in practice. The book presents the most noteworthy methods and results discussed at the International Conference on Reliability and Statistics in Transportation and Communication (RelStat), which took place in Riga, Latvia on October 17 – 20, 2018. It spans a broad spectrum of topics, from mathematical models and design methodologies, to software engineering, data security and financial issues, as well as practical problems in technical systems, such as transportation and telecommunications, and in engineering education.
Download or read book 1970 Census of Population written by United States. Bureau of the Census and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 1088 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Pennsylvania Railroad Volume 1 written by Albert J. Churella and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 970 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Do not think of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a business enterprise," Forbes magazine informed its readers in May 1936. "Think of it as a nation." At the end of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest privately owned business corporation in the world. In 1914, the PRR employed more than two hundred thousand people—more than double the number of soldiers in the United States Army. As the self-proclaimed "Standard Railroad of the World," this colossal corporate body underwrote American industrial expansion and shaped the economic, political, and social environment of the United States. In turn, the PRR was fundamentally shaped by the American landscape, adapting to geography as well as shifts in competitive economics and public policy. Albert J. Churella's masterful account, certain to become the authoritative history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, illuminates broad themes in American history, from the development of managerial practices and labor relations to the relationship between business and government to advances in technology and transportation. Churella situates exhaustive archival research on the Pennsylvania Railroad within the social, economic, and technological changes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, chronicling the epic history of the PRR intertwined with that of a developing nation. This first volume opens with the development of the Main Line of Public Works, devised by Pennsylvanians in the 1820s to compete with the Erie Canal. Though a public rather than a private enterprise, the Main Line foreshadowed the establishment of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1846. Over the next decades, as the nation weathered the Civil War, industrial expansion, and labor unrest, the PRR expanded despite competition with rival railroads and disputes with such figures as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. The dawn of the twentieth century brought a measure of stability to the railroad industry, enabling the creation of such architectural monuments as Pennsylvania Station in New York City. The volume closes at the threshold of American involvement in World War I, as the strategies that PRR executives had perfected in previous decades proved less effective at guiding the company through increasingly tumultuous economic and political waters.
