Author: Mark Aldrich Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 9780801882364 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 492
Book Description
"The evolution of railroad safety, Aldrich argues, involved the interplay of market forces, science and technology, and legal and public pressures. He considers the railroad as a system in its entirety: operational realities, technical constraints, economic history, internal politics, and labor management. Aldrich shows that economics initially encouraged American carriers to build and operate cheap and dangerous lines. Only over time did the trade-off between safety and output - shaped by labor markets and public policy - motivate carriers to develop technological improvements that enhanced both productivity and safety."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Mark Aldrich Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 9780801894022 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
For most of the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, railroads dominated American transportation. They transformed life and captured the imagination. Yet by 1907 railroads had also become the largest cause of violent death in the country, that year claiming the lives of nearly twelve thousand passengers, workers, and others. In Death Rode the Rails Mark Aldrich explores the evolution of railroad safety in the United States by examining a variety of incidents: spectacular train wrecks, smaller accidents in shops and yards that devastated the lives of workers and their families, and the deaths of thousands of women and children killed while walking on or crossing the street-grade tracks. The evolution of railroad safety, Aldrich argues, involved the interplay of market forces, science and technology, and legal and public pressures. He considers the railroad as a system in its entirety: operational realities, technical constraints, economic history, internal politics, and labor management. Aldrich shows that economics initially encouraged American carriers to build and operate cheap and dangerous lines. Only over time did the trade-off between safety and output—shaped by labor markets and public policy—motivate carriers to develop technological improvements that enhanced both productivity and safety. A fascinating account of one of America's most important industries and its dangers, Death Rode the Rails will appeal to scholars of economics and the history of transportation, technology, labor, regulation, safety, and business, as well as to railroad enthusiasts.
Author: Mark Aldrich Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801882362 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 481
Book Description
"The evolution of railroad safety, Aldrich argues, involved the interplay of market forces, science and technology, and legal and public pressures. He considers the railroad as a system in its entirety: operational realities, technical constraints, economic history, internal politics, and labor management. Aldrich shows that economics initially encouraged American carriers to build and operate cheap and dangerous lines. Only over time did the trade-off between safety and output - shaped by labor markets and public policy - motivate carriers to develop technological improvements that enhanced both productivity and safety."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Janet Dawson Publisher: SCB Distributors ISBN: 1564747735 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 207
Book Description
December 23, 1952. A transcontinental train is stopped cold by a rockslide in a remote Colorado canyon. There’s a murderer aboard, one who has already killed, and will kill again unless stopped. The California Zephyr, with its run from Oakland to Chicago and back, was famous for its Vista-Domes, which provided a 360-degree view of spectacular Western scenery. It was a kind of small city populated by passengers from all walks of life and a large crew whose duty it was to keep them safe. Zephyrette Jill McLeod is the passengers’ primary point of contact. She’s armed for any emergency—with a first-aid kit, a screwdriver, and her knowledge of human nature. But can she figure out a ruthless killer's clever plot in time?
Author: Albert J. Churella Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812207629 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 970
Book Description
"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.
Author: Arwen Mohun Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421407906 Category : Health & Fitness Languages : en Pages : 341
Book Description
How have Americans confronted, managed, and even enjoyed the risks of daily life? Winner of the Ralph Gomory Prize of the Business History Conference “Risk” is a capacious term used to describe the uncertainties that arise from physical, financial, political, and social activities. Practically everything we do carries some level of risk—threats to our bodies, property, and animals. How do we determine when the risk is too high? In considering this question, Arwen P. Mohun offers a thought-provoking study of danger and how people have managed it from pre-industrial and industrial America up until today. Mohun outlines a vernacular risk culture in early America, one based on ordinary experience and common sense. The rise of factories and machinery eventually led to shocking accidents, which, she explains, risk-management experts and the “gospel of safety” sought to counter. Finally, she examines the simultaneous blossoming of risk-taking as fun and the aggressive regulations that follow from the consumer-products-safety movement. Risk and society, a rapidly growing area of historical research, interests sociologists, psychologists, and other social scientists. Americans have learned to tame risk in both the workplace and the home. Yet many of us still like amusement park rides that scare the devil out of us; they dare us to take risks.
Author: David Michael Smith Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1583679898 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 528
Book Description
An argument against the myth of "American exceptionalism" Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire helps us to come to terms with what we have long suspected: the rise of the U.S. Empire has relied upon an almost unimaginable loss of life, from its inception during the European colonial period, to the present. And yet, in the face of a series of endless holocausts at home and abroad, the doctrine of American exceptionalism has plagued the globe for over a century. However much the ruling class insists on U.S. superiority, we find ourselves in the midst of a sea change. Perpetual wars, deteriorating economic conditions, the resurgence of white supremacy, and the rise of the Far Right have led millions of people to abandon their illusions about this country. Never before have so many people rejected or questioned traditional platitudes about the United States. In Endless Holocausts author David Michael Smith demolishes the myth of exceptionalism by demonstrating that manifold forms of mass death, far from being unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise benign historical record, have been indispensable in the rise of the wealthiest and most powerful imperium in the history of the world. At the same time, Smith points to an extraordinary history of resistance by Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, people in other nations brutalized by U.S. imperialism, workers, and democratic-minded people around the world determined to fight for common dignity and the sake of the greater good.
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Author: Mark Aldrich
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