Episode 355: Steam Powered

Historically Thinking

At a pivotal moment in Chapter 17 of Nathanael Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, two of his protagonists escape from haunted Salem, Massachusetts, and are whirled away from its power by the even greater power of steam: “…Looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own.” As in Hawthorne, American literature of all kinds abounded with railroad and steam power metaphors. In an incredibly short time, a new technology became a point of reference for a nation. In 1858, when Sallie McNeill of Brazoria County in Texas first saw a train, she noted in her diary that “I could hardly realize that this was my first sight of the ‘iron horse’, because I have read and heard of the cars so often, that everything seemed natural.” With me to discuss steamboats, railroads, and steam engines, and their cultural power in the antebellum United States, is Aaron W. Marrs, author of The American Transportation Revolution: A Social and Cultural History. Aaron Marrs is a historian at the Department of State; and I should announce here that his views on steamboats, railroads, and steam engines, and related topics, are his own, and not those of the State Department or the federal government. For Further Investigation In Episode 134, Cynthia Kierner and I touched on steamboat disasters–among many other disasters; and if you're interested in an overview of the history of technology since approximately 1450, listen to Episode 251. Andrew W. Marrs, Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society–"Far from seeing the Old South as backward and premodern, Marrs finds evidence of urban life, industry, and entrepreneurship throughout the region. But these signs of progress existed alongside efforts to preserve traditional ways of life. Railroads exemplified Southerners' pursuit of progress on their own terms: developing modern transportation while retaining a conservative social order." February 27, 1859: The Steamboat Princess Disaster Mark Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828-1965 Michael J. Connolly, Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England