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hello everyone i hope you're all doing well this lecture is about railroads and economic geography in the first half of the lecture we'll look at how railroad building created a new geography of capital that was centered
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on chicago in the mid 19th century and in the second half of the lecture we'll focus on the west in the late 19th century to think about the relationship between transcontinental railroads
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and the federal government now in a previous lecture on the new transportation infrastructures of the early 19th century we saw how railroad travel compressed time and space by making it possible for people to travel
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travel farther distances in shorter amounts of time and here you can see that in 1830 it took three weeks to get from new york to chicago by a largely overland route
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and by 1857 it was possible to get all the way across the country from east coast to west coast in four weeks as you can see from the map so it was faster for people to travel and it was also faster for goods to
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travel and in this way the railroad industry would play a key role and reshape reshaping the geography of capital in the mid 19th century it was chicago that was at the center of
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this new geography of capital and as you can see from this slide the boom and railroad building in the 1850s meant that chicago rose to prominence as the major
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transportation hub in the region and this regional railroad geography had global reach as you can see in this promotional lithograph for the illinois central railroad and you can see the locomotive bursting forth from the
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three-dimensional globe itself with a map of the illinois central routes which you can see right here prominently depicted on the map of the u.s and if you look at the inset images here
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and here you'll see the world that the railroad has left behind so travel by horse-drawn carriage in the upper right and travel by canal boat in the lower right the locomotive is in close proximity to
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the telegraph wires here and to the steam ship there taken together they represent the transportation and communication infrastructure of modern global capitalism and so in
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this way the promotional lithograph is depicting the illinois central at the center of a narrative of technological progress now why was chicago so important it was the hub linking eastern capital
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and western markets rural and urban farm and factory and no single railroad company operated trains both east and west of chicago so goods and travelers always had to be
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transferred in chicago people had to get off one train and get on to another goods had to be unloaded from one train and then reloaded on to another by 1860 chicago was the eastern terminus
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for basically every major railroad west of lake michigan and by 1869 chicago was connected by rail to the pacific so chicago became the single most important city
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in shaping the landscape and the economy of the mid-continent in the second half of the 19th century it links different railroad systems in different markets and it was a link not just between east and west but it also connected european goods and markets
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with the american northeast with the great west and the great west is the 19th century term for the interior region of the country from the ohio river to the pacific now in the second half of the lecture
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we'll shift our attention to the west in the late 19th century now i hope this painting looks familiar we looked at it earlier in the course and saw how in this vision of american progress technical innovation is the
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driving force and in this ideology indigenous people are swept aside by the unstoppable forces of progress prospectors farmers and settlers are accompanying the railroads and the
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stagecoaches that are headed west to cultivate the land and extract natural resources indigenous peoples you can see right here fleeing into the darkness on the left side of the
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image they faced an onslaught as military and railroad builders moved west and violently swept them off their lands in a process of settler colonialism and images like this one are part of
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cultural understandings of the 19th century american west as a mythic place of rugged individualism self-made men braving the harsh conditions of the frontier to establish white settlements that
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would become prosperous cities and the rowdy and roaring camp towns in the mining industry for example contribute to the cultural memory of the american west as a place of lawlessness away from the established
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institutions governance and social norms of the east and the the so-called cowboys and indians theme would endure into the 20th century in hollywood film as a genre of the western became very
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popular so although this idea of the west as a mythical place of rugged individualism and lawlessness has endured in popular culture and memory the historical reality is quite different
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and the late 19th century west was actually a laboratory for state building and what this means is that the growth of the federal government is a major part of the history of the late 19th century american west
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and the west shaped the government as well through bureaucratic responses to disputes over indian territory as it was known the process of land management and the administration of
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geological surveys the federal government also administered the transfer of public lands to private ownership through the homestead act of the transcontinental railroad act both of 1862
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and here is just a bit of information on the homestead act if you're not familiar with that from some of your earlier courses now the historian richard white who i would say is the leading historian
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working on environment and technology in the west has described the west as the kindergarten of the american state and the kin by kindergarten of the american state he's describing the west as a place where
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as he puts it the federal government nurtured its power and produced its bureaucracies and he discusses the presence of the u.s army in the west the process of land
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management and agencies like bureau of indian affairs the u.s geological survey and the forest service and he says westerners more than inhabitants of any other section depended on the presence of the federal
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government what is perhaps most striking about such a broad overview of the west during the last century and a half is that a region defined in the popular mind by icons of individualism
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cowboys mountain men gunfighters can more accurately be seen as the child of government and large corporations so this is a an important and powerful revision of a long-standing assumption about the
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american west and he says in in a similar vein that in the imagination of modern america the west has come to stand for independence self-reliance and
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individualism and then goes on to say that the west more than any other region it's a creation of federal efforts more than any other region the west has been historically a dependency
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of the federal government and here here are some passages from his book uh on a new history of the american west where he elaborates this argument in more detail and here i just want to
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call your attention to institutions and bureaucracies and from the post office and the custom service which also existed in the east um to some of the most consequential
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bureaucracies of the 19th century american state so bureau of indian affairs land office u.s geological survey interior department as the federal government expanded its administrative capacity in the years
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after the civil war it was the west where this new administrative capacity where these new federal bureaucracies and agencies were actually being created now we'll look at the transcontinentals
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in more depth in our next lecture but here i just want to pause and look briefly at this map which shows the extent to which railroads and especially the transcontinentals were reliant on either full or partial land grants from the
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federal government another way to visualize it is in terms of area so this map gives you a sense of the size of the land grants given to railroad companies by
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the us government and so these are public lands often land where indigenous peoples had lived long before the founding of the united states public lands that the federal government gave to railroads as right of way or to sell the land to get
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capital to finance railroad building projects and as richard white points out if you put all the land grant land together it would actually be the third largest state so when we look at a graph like this and
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i used to teach the u.s survey so i can tell you that some version of this graph always appears in american history textbooks in the big business chapter right after the civil war and the reconstruction chapters so
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when you see a version of this graph or you see a version of these statistics it's important to remember remember that what this graph is actually showing without saying it is
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a story of american capitalism in which the rapid growth of the railroad industry was powered in large part by government transfer of public lands to corporate ownership
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you may also see a different version of these maps which show you the increasing reach and the density of railroad networks in 1860 1870 you can see after the first
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transcontinental was completed 1880 you can see the density of the railroad networks around chicago in 1890 after several transcontinentals
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have been completed so these maps are not just an illustration of how american capitalism created the first national transportation infrastructure it's also an illustration of the extent to which private enterprise was
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dependent on government funding in this case in the form of land grants and in our next lecture in the next module we'll look at the transcontinental railroads in more detail and will pay particular attention to the
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social and ecological consequences they had for indigenous peoples and the american bison that lived on the lands that the railroads colonized with the help of the federal government
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thank you for watching everyone i hope you're all doing well take good care bye-bye
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