Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America - Richard White
The muscular marvel of the Industrial Age connected the West to the East of 1800s America. It spawned farms and factories, towns and cities.
The men who created the transcontinentals - Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Jay Gould, Mark Hopkins, Charles Francis Adams Jr. and others were the high-tech moguls of their day and contributed to the prosperity and development of America.
America - railroaded in the gilded age - was an evolution replete with corruption, political bribery, fraudulent conversion, an unthinkable lack of safety standards for workers, disarmingly packaged in fictional financials.
Central Pacific; Southern Pacific; Union Pacific - examples of highly leveraged entities equal to the cavalier operators on today's Wall Street with their powerful enablers in Washington. Scared investors dumped their weakened railroad stock in the 1870s and 90s that precipitated a depression, similar to and narrowly missed in recent years.
A scathing (and not so new) view of the Gilded Age.
White's book posits the truism - what if the steel lines had been laid subject to demand and not the mad dash to compete and conquer as was done, "We need to think about what did not happen in order to think historically."
American capitalism historically overbuilt, overpromised and delivered bankruptcies and decimated ecosystems - recall gold and silver mining, oil drilling, nuclear power and so on. The battle cry of enterprise ... too much is never enough.
10 epic train journeys
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/06/17/ten.epic.train.journeys.cnngo/?iref=obinsite
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