Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910

Nothing so changed nineteenth-century America as did the railroad. Growing up together, the iron horse and the young nation developed a fast friendship. Railroad Crossing is the story of what happened to that friendship, particularly in California, and it illuminates the chaos that was industrial America from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first decade of the twentieth.

Americans clamored for the progress and prosperity that railroads would surely bring, and no railroad was...