Author: Robert Carroll Reed Publisher: ISBN: Category : Transportation Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
This volume provides black & white photographs and etchings of just about every imaginable type of train accident including boiler explosions, telescoping, bridge failures, head-on and rear-end collisions, mostly from the last half of the 1800's. The text presents many bits and pieces of U.S. railroad history as well as some contemporary accounts of life on the tracks, providing insight into how the railroads have progressed technologically and the impacts those advances have had on railroad safety.
Author: Barbara Young Welke Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521649667 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 436
Book Description
Through courtroom dramas from 1865 to 1920 - of men forced to jump from moving cars when trainmen refused to stop, of women emotionally wrecked from the trauma of nearly missing a platform or street, and women barred from first class ladies' cars because of the color of their skin - Barbara Welke offers a dramatic reconsideration of the critical role railroads, and streetcars, played in transforming the conditions of individual liberty at the dawn of the twentieth century. The three-part narrative, focusing on the law of accidental injury, nervous shock, and racial segregation in public transit, captures Americans' journey from a cultural and legal ethos celebrating manly independence and autonomy to one that recognized and sought to protect the individual against the dangers of modern life. Gender and race become central to the transformation charted here, as much as the forces of corporate power, modern technology and urban space.
Author: Amy G. Richter Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 080787647X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
Recognizing the railroad's importance as both symbol and experience in Victorian America, Amy G. Richter follows women travelers onto trains and considers the consequences of their presence there. For a time, Richter argues, nineteenth-century Americans imagined the public realm as a chaotic and dangerous place full of potential, where various groups came together, collided, and influenced one another, for better or worse. The example of the American railroad reveals how, by the beginning of the twentieth century, this image was replaced by one of a domesticated public realm--a public space in which both women and men increasingly strove to make themselves "at home." Through efforts that ranged from the homey touches of railroad car decor to advertising images celebrating female travelers and legal cases sanctioning gender-segregated spaces, travelers and railroad companies transformed the railroad from a place of risk and almost unlimited social mixing into one in which white men and women alleviated the stress of unpleasant social contact. Making themselves "at home" aboard the trains, white men and women domesticated the railroad for themselves and paved the way for a racially segregated and class-stratified public space that freed women from the home yet still preserved the railroad as a masculine domain.
Author: Robert C. Reed Publisher: Pictorial History of Accidents ISBN: Category : Health & Fitness Languages : en Pages : 190
Book Description
American railroad history is filled with accounts of misadventure. Steam boilers blew up. Bridges collapsed under the weight of heavy engines. Locomotives crashed head-on because of signal failures. Passenger cars derailed, often with dire results. Lightly built wooden coaches splintered on impact, and the debris often ignited from the coals in the iron stoves used for heating. In the mid-nineteenth century American railroading was burgeoning -- a growth too fast for safe operations. Despite the grim statistics of 19th and early 20th century train wrecks that resulted, one cannot help but find the photographs and public prints of the day interesting. When you pick up this wondrous book, you will have a hard time putting it down.
Author: Jamie L. Bronstein Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804700085 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
Caught In the Machinery examines the social, legal, cultural and political history of workplace accidents and injured workers in 19th-century Britain and in the broader Anglo-American context.
Author: Dick Kreck Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing ISBN: 1555919529 Category : Transportation Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
Overnight settlements, better known as "Hell on Wheels," sprang up as the transcontinental railroad crossed Nebraska and Wyoming. They brought opportunity not only for legitimate business but also for gamblers, land speculators, prostitutes, and thugs. Dick Kreck tells their stories along with the heroic individuals who managed, finally, to create permanent towns in the interior West.
Author: Christine Quigley Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 9780786401703 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
Throughout the centuries, different cultures have established a variety of procedures for handling and disposing of corpses. Often the methods are directly associated with the deceased's position in life, such as a pharaoh's mummification in Egypt or the cremation of a Buddhist. Treatment by the living of the dead over time and across cultures is the focus of study. Burial arrangements and preparations are detailed, including embalming, the funeral service, storage and transport of the body, and forms of burial. Autopsies and the investigative process of causes of deliberate death are fully covered. Preservation techniques such as cryonic suspension and mummification are discussed, as well as a look at the recycling of the corpse through organ donation, donation to medicine, animal scavengers, cannibalism, and, of course, natural decay and decomposition. Mistreatments of a corpse are also covered.
Author: Valerie Knowles Publisher: Dundurn ISBN: 177070163X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 506
Book Description
Winner of the 2005 Ottawa Book Award for Non-fiction , the 2005 University of British Columbia Award for Best Canadian Biography, and the Canadian Railroad Historical Association Award for Best Railway Book of the Year. William Van Horne was one of North America’s most accomplished men. Born in Illinois in 1843, he became a prominent railway figure in the United States before coming to Canada in 1881 to become general manager of the fledgling Canadian Pacific Railway. Van Horne pushed through construction of the CPR’s transcontinental line and went on to become company president. He also became one of Canada’s foremost financiers and art collectors, capping his career by opening Cuba’s interior with a railway.
Author: Greg Siegel Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822376237 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
In Forensic Media, Greg Siegel considers how photographic, electronic, and digital media have been used to record and reconstruct accidents, particularly high-speed crashes and catastrophes. Focusing in turn on the birth of the field of forensic engineering, Charles Babbage's invention of a "self-registering apparatus" for railroad trains, flight-data and cockpit voice recorders ("black boxes"), the science of automobile crash-testing, and various accident-reconstruction techniques and technologies, Siegel shows how "forensic media" work to transmute disruptive chance occurrences into reassuring narratives of causal succession. Through historical and philosophical analyses, he demonstrates that forensic media are as much technologies of cultural imagination as they are instruments of scientific inscription, as imbued with ideological fantasies as they are compelled by institutional rationales. By rethinking the historical links and cultural relays between accidents and forensics, Siegel sheds new light on the corresponding connections between media, technology, and modernity.
Author: Charity Vogel Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801469767 Category : Transportation Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
On December 18, 1867, the Buffalo and Erie Railroad’s eastbound New York Express derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York, on the shores of Lake Erie. The last two cars of the express train were pitched completely off the tracks and plummeted into the creek bed below. When they struck bottom, one of the wrecked cars was immediately engulfed in flames as the heating stoves in the coach spilled out coals and ignited its wooden timbers. The other car was badly smashed. About fifty people died at the bottom of the gorge or shortly thereafter, and dozens more were injured. Rescuers from the small rural community responded with haste, but there was almost nothing they could do but listen to the cries of the dying—and carry away the dead and injured thrown clear of the fiery wreck. The next day and in the weeks that followed, newspapers across the country carried news of the “Angola Horror,” one of the deadliest railway accidents to that point in U.S. history. In a dramatic historical narrative, Charity Vogel tells the gripping, true-to-life story of the wreck and the characters involved in the tragic accident. Her tale weaves together the stories of the people—some unknown; others soon to be famous—caught up in the disaster, the facts of the New York Express’s fateful run, the fiery scenes in the creek ravine, and the subsequent legal, legislative, and journalistic search for answers to the question: what had happened at Angola, and why? The Angola Horror is a classic story of disaster and its aftermath, in which events coincide to produce horrific consequences and people are forced to respond to experiences that test the limits of their endurance. Vogel sets the Angola Horror against a broader context of the developing technology of railroads, the culture of the nation’s print media, the public policy legislation of the post–Civil War era, and, finally, the culture of death and mourning in the Victorian period. The Angola Horror sheds light on the psyche of the American nation. The fatal wreck of an express train nine years later, during a similar bridge crossing in Ashtabula, Ohio, serves as a chilling coda to the story.
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Author: Robert Carroll Reed
Author: Barbara Young Welke
Author: Amy G. Richter
Author: Robert C. Reed
Author: Jamie L. Bronstein
Author: Dick Kreck
Author: Christine Quigley
Author: Valerie Knowles
Author: Greg Siegel
Author: Charity Vogel