Mapping the West: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photographs from the Boston Public Library

This is the catalogue of the exhibition "Mapping the West" at Boston University Art Gallery

Technological Innovations and Endogenous Changes in U.S. Legal Institutions, 1790-1920

Recent scholarship highlights the importance of institutions to the processes of economic growth, but the precise nature of their relationship bears further examination. This paper considers how the evolution of legal institutions has contributed to, and in turn been affected by, major technological innovations. The first section of the paper examines the U.S. intellectual property system. Patent and copyright laws, and their interpretation and enforcement by the federal judiciary, certainly influenced the course of technical and cultural change, but it is clear that they did not develop independently of the state of technology and of the economy. Both the statutes and their interpretations altered in response to the introduction and diffusion of new technologies. The second section explores in more detail the impact of some of these technological innovations -- including steamboats, railroads, telegraphy, medical technologies, and automobiles -- on the common law, regulation and insurance. Such technological advances often led to institutional bottlenecks, which then required accommodations in legal rules and their enforcement. Although the common law had some capability for economizing on legal adjustment costs through 'adjudication by analogy', the socio-economic changes wrought by major innovations ultimately produced more fundamental change in legal institutions, such as shifts in the relative importance of state and federal policies, and in the degree of reliance on regulation by bureaucracy. In sum, the historical record of the evolution of legal rules and standards in the United States indicates a remarkable degree of flexibility as such institutions responded to changing economic circumstances.

Special Libraries, November 1914

Volume 5, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1914/1008/thumbnail.jp

Special Libraries, February 1925

Volume 16, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1925/1001/thumbnail.jp

Introduction to The Chinese and the Iron Road

Excerpt from The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, edited by Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, with Hilton Obenzinger and Roland Hs

Stokesville, Virginia: An enduring depot for an ephemeral town

This thesis project attempts to establish the significance of both the town of Stokesville, Virginia as well as the town’s historic Passenger Depot. The written component of the project contains a Historic Structures Report, which documents the history of the passenger depot within the larger historic context of local and national history. The Historic Structures Report utilizes National Register Criteria to argue for the depots significance due to its association with transportation of the historic Chesapeake Western Railway and as a regionally unique example of railway architecture. The second component of the thesis is a digital exhibit that asserts the significance of the town’s history. As a town with little physically remaining, this digital exhibit seeks to bring the town of Stokesville back to life by providing public access to a history that is currently hidden away in archives and private collections

Over the Range

Francaviglia looks anew at the geographical-historical context of the driving of the golden spike in May 1869. He gazes outward from the site of the transcontinental railroad\u27s completion—the summit of a remote mountain range that extends south into the Great Salt Lake. The transportation corridor that for the first time linked America\u27s coasts gave this distinctive region significance, but it anchored two centuries of human activity linked to the area\u27s landscape. Francaviglia brings to that larger story a geographer\u27s perspective on place and society, a railroad enthusiast\u27s knowledge of trains, a cartographic historian\u27s understanding of the knowledge and experience embedded in maps, and a desert lover\u27s appreciation of the striking basin-and-range landscape that borders the Great Salt Lake.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1114/thumbnail.jp

Middle-class millions: The creation of Atlantic City\u27s modern image, 1890-1910

By the end of the nineteenth century, vacationing became more accessible to middle-class Americans than ever before, resulting in the growth of tourist destinations on the New Jersey shore, particularly in Atlantic City. Between 1890 and 1910, government officials, railroad companies, and hotel owners advertised Atlantic City’s technological and cultural modernity to middle-class Americans particularly in Philadelphia, creating an image of Atlantic City as a modern middle-class utopia. This thesis further examines the relationship between consumerism and American middle-class identity. While we often consider the link between consumerism and identity to have been solidified in American culture following the Second World War, in its modern, mass-consumption sense, it originated during the period of industrialization following the end of the Civil War. By the turn of the century, the emergence of a middle class brought greater wealth into the hands of more Americans than ever before. I argue that Atlantic City’s popularity as a summer resort stemmed from its association with middle-class consumerist habits. From the city’s infrastructure, to the technology of its hotels, to the structure of social engagement in its hotels and on its beach and boardwalk, Atlantic City became the site of middle-class leisure by combining modern aspects of urban life with the rejuvenation offered by the shore’s rurality. Predominantly using newspapers, I have analyzed the arguments of Atlantic City’s advertisers to demonstrate that the city’s emergence as a popular resort was not in the 1920s, as other historians claim, but in the first decade of the twentieth century. The first chapter describes the efforts by railroads and city officials to create Atlantic City as a modern, urban landscape offering the technology and spatial arrangement of larger cities while maintaining the healing properties of a coastal town. The second chapter analyzes the modern features of the city’s hotels—from their construction to their accommodations—highlighting their transition from small, public buildings to large, brick-and-steel skyscrapers with more private spaces. The third chapter addresses the social undertakings of middle-class visitors to the shore, describing how these regional actions reflected national trends in the creation of a middle-class identity

Miniature Nation Building: Model Railroading and the Dialectics of Scale in Post-WWII America

This thesis advances a critical understanding of how scale informs the production and consumption of the American nation, and it makes a foray into Marxist critical analysis by integrating the theoretical and methodological objectives of historical materialism with the multiple, dialectically construed dimensionalities of scale. The hobby of model railroading serves as the case study for this analysis, and the dialectics of scale as the theoretical apparatus with which this analysis is articulated. The central argument of the thesis is that the model railroad hobby builds the nation, in miniature, through the continual regeneration of American masculinity, the traditional American family, archetypical spatial and geographic imaginaries, paradigmatic historical moments, and the ways in which the railroad links all of these together. Subtending this larger argument are questions of how the categories of race, class, gender, and nation are mutually constituted and reinscribed in everyday cultural practices like model railroading. The bulk of the evidence is drawn from hobby catalogs, magazines, and advertisements from the 1930s through the 1950s. The primary historical period under investigation is the decade-and-a-half following World War II, though the late-nineteenth century and the late-twentieth century are considered as part of the larger historical constellation that surrounds the early postwar era. All three periods, and the first two in particular, were marked by bourgeois anxiety over an increasingly modern present and nostalgia for an idealized past. These periods also saw bursts in model railroading activity, which suggests that the hobby has been repeatedly called upon to mediate the real and imagined historical losses that have characterized American modernity

Special Libraries, January 1915

Volume 6, Issue 1https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1915/1000/thumbnail.jp