railroads

Fitzhugh Turner | December 1958

Snowshed crews on the Central Pacific, battling blizzards and snowslides, built “the longest house in the world”

W. Eugene Hollon | June 1957

Opening the mail route to California, the Butterfield coaches flew across the rugged, wild Southwest in twenty-five exhausting days

The Great Rail Wreck At Revere

Stewart H. Holbrook | April 1957

Single-track lines run by one-track minds gave the reformers of Boston their biggest cause since abolition

So long as it remained in public consciousness it was known as the Great Revere Disaster. Written or spoken it deserved the adjective, and the capitals. Worse railroad wrecks had happened before; worse were to come after.

How Rails Saved a Seaport

William B. Catton | February 1957

John W. Garrett turned the pioneer Baltimore & Ohio into a great instrument for tapping the treasure of the West

Farewell To Steam

Oliver Jensen | December 1957

The iron horses that built America are nearly all gathered on the other side of Jordan

It was the way they worked the cord and changed the steam pressure that made the whistle almost seem to talk.

Varnish For The Nabobs

Lucius Beebe | June 1956

For decades the private railroad car was the great symbol of wealth. Here is what it looked like in its heyday.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.