Synopses & Reviews
“Travelers hitting the highways this summer might better appreciate the asphalt beneath their tires thanks to this engrossing history of the creation of the U.S. interstate system.”—
Los Angeles Times Perhaps nothing changed the face of America more than the creation of the interstate system. At once man-made wonders, economic pipelines, agents of sprawl, and uniquely American sirens of escape, the interstates snake into every aspect of modern life. The Big Roads documents their historic creation and the many people they’ve affected, from the speed demon who inspired a primitive web of dirt auto trails, to the cadre of largely forgotten technocrats who planned the system years before Ike reached the White House, to the thousands of city dwellers who resisted the concrete juggernaut when it bore down on their neighborhoods.
The Big Roads tells the story of this essential feature of the landscape we have come to take for granted. With a view toward players both great and small, Swift gives readers the full story of one of America’s greatest engineering achievements.
“Engaging, informative . . . The first thorough history of the expressway system.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
“The book is a road geek’s treasure—and everyone who travels the highways ought to know these stories.”—Kirkus Reviews
Review
Starred Review. Excellent big-picture, popularly written history of the Howard Zinn mold, backed by a mountain of research and statistics.This is history as dark comedy, brilliant and unsettling, puncturing facile economics and bland history alike. With ingenious research and iconoclastic perspective, Richard White recasts our understanding of a major chapter in American history. Mark Twain would be bitterly amused to learn just how gilded the Gilded Age really was. --Edward L. Ayers, President, University of Richmond
Review
Combining a robust wit with a dedication to endless labor in archives, Richard White delivers a sharp-edged new understanding of industrialization in the Gilded Age. Railroaded offers flabbergasting views of the human talent for self-justification and contradiction, provides a valuable—if unsettling—comparison to the financial troubles of our times, and shows why the best historians are compared to detectives. To readers intimidated by the topic of railroad finance: master your fears and stay on board for a very wild ride. --Patricia Limerick, Center of the American West, University of Colorado
Review
This brilliant book will forever change our understanding of the great railroad projects of nineteenth century America. Stripping away easy assumptions of technological triumph and financial wizardry, Railroaded tells a richer and darker story of post-Civil War America. Smashingly researched, cleverly written, and shrewdly argued all the way through, this is a powerful, smart, even angry book about politics, greed, corruption, money, and corporate arrogance, and the America formed out of them after the Civil War. --William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
Review
Richard White is one of those rare historians with an unfailing ability to transform any topic he writes about, no matter how familiar that topic might seem. In Railroaded, he tells the story of the western transcontinentals as it has never been told before, with insights that speak as much to our own time as to the nineteenth-century era he explores with such wit and intelligence. --William Cronon, author of Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Review
There is not a historian in America with a steadier gaze than Richard White’s: with him, no assumption goes unchallenged, no wisdom is ever merely received. Railroaded is a wonderful book: fresh, provocative, witty, filled with foreshadowing of our world but always true to its time, and told with the narrative force of a locomotive roaring across the empty plains. --Geoffrey C. Ward, author of A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt
Review
Railroaded is a leviathan, a provocative challenge to a major myth about the American West: that transcontinentals were a triumph of American entrepreneurship and ingenuity, and a godsend to those who invested in, worked on, rode, lived near, or encountered them. Far from it, Richard West argues in a strongly written narrative that barrels along the track as it draws on intimate vignettes of players great and small, these railroads often proved to be a disaster for all but the handful that dreamed them up and, abetted by cronyism and complacent governmental regulation, enriched themselves as they impoverished the rest. This tale of havoc is an unsettling allegory of today's financial collapse and essential reading for all unnerved by the thought that we seem doomed to repeat history whether we are aware of it or not. --Shepard Krech III, author of The Ecological Indian and professor emeritus, Brown University
Review
When it comes to the American West, there is no other writer like Richard White, a serious scholar with a highly original take on familiar subjects and wit and elegant prose besides. His subject, the making of the transcontinental railroads, is perhaps the pivotal story of the American West, but it’s not the one most of us know from movies and mythologies. It's about the birth of all those things that most trouble us nowadays, a genesis story in which the serpent in Eden is the railroad itself writhing across the continent. A story of corporate power, industrialization, and political corruption, White tells it as it needs to be told. --Rebecca Solnit, author of River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
Review
"Americas interstate system tied together urban areas, bypassed thousands of small-town main streets, fanned the sprawl of suburbia, and sent millions of baby boomers on road trips with their parents, asking, ‘Are we there yet? With a great sense of how this changed the country, Earl Swift has told an intriguing tale of vision, personal sacrifice, and can-do determination." —Walter R. Borneman, author of
Rival Rails: The Race to Build Americas Greatest Transcontinental Railroad "Objects in the rearview mirror prove eerily close on every page of this lively, eminently sensible history of the guardrailed monument to American mobility." —John R. Stilgoe, author of
Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape "A joy ride. Earl Swift has written the best kind of popular history--one that paints vivid portraits, debunks myths and brings to life the fascinating and appalling stories behind the creation of that massive mixed blessing known as America's interstate highways."—Bill Morris,
author of
Motor City "Swift has added texture and nuance, as well as narrative economy, to a story containing volumes, and he makes for an ideal traveling companion." —
New York Times Book Review "Travelers hitting the highways this summer might better appreciate the asphalt beneath their tires thanks to this engrossing history of the creation of the U.S. interstate system."—Los Angeles Times
“Engaging, informative . . . The first thorough history of the expressway system.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
"The book is a road geeks treasure—and everyone who travels the highways ought to know these stories." —Kirkus
"Readers interested in urban planning as well as engineering will find a well-told story about a defining American feature." —Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
The transcontinental railroads of the late nineteenth century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the U.S. economy. Their dependence on public largess drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, and remade the landscape of the West. As wheel and rail, car and coal, they opened new worlds of work and ways of life. Their discriminatory rates sparked broad opposition and a new antimonopoly politics. With characteristic originality, range, and authority, Richard White shows the transcontinentals to be pivotal actors in the making of modern America. But the triumphal myths of the golden spike, robber barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here. Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success.
Synopsis
A new, incisive history of the transcontinental railroads and how they transformed America in the decades after the Civil War.
Synopsis
A history of the planning, construction, and impact of the U.S. interstate highway system.
About the Author
EARL SWIFT is the author of three previous books, including Where They Lay, a 2003 PEN finalist. He lives in Virginia with his daughter Saylor.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction 1
Part I
Out of the Mud 9
Part II
Connecting the Dots 63
Part III
The Crooked Straight, the Rough Places Plain 155
Part IV
The Human Obstacle 225
Acknowledgments 325
Notes 328