#US Transcontinental Railroad

[hkayakh]

The US railroad is transcontinental?? Congrats on its transition!!

[thunderstorm-skald]

currently reading After Promontory: 150 Years of Transcontinental Railroading

[liberty1776]

Cronyism in America: The Nation’s First Big Business | Patrick Newman

[gaykarstaagforever]

We talk about the rapid change of technology now. But since Industrialization, that's just how it is.

In 1847, white people going from Iowa to California had to do it in wagons, and whether you made it or not in 6 months was 100% contingent on the weather and how fast you could reload a flintlock. By 1869 they has finished the Transcontinental Railroad, and for 4 days you could massacre buffalo with a repeater rifle from the window of a train over the mountains.

That's 22 years. That is the same amount of time I experienced between watching the first Matrix movie and the big screen adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen.

I mean, there was other more significant stuff that happened between those two movies. But I think you get the point.

...There was also some more significant stuff that happened in America between 1847 and 1869, honestly.

Look. Can I do ONE POST without mentioning 1.6 million dead people?? Jeez.

[vavoom-sorted-art]

Good Omens x Wild West

Jumped on the transcontinental railroad to play around with how our ineffable husbands would look in the wild west.

Fun facts

Crowley hates horses and horses hate him

Aziraphale is posing as a doctor

Crowley has two guns, but doesn't know how to use them (Aziraphale does, though.)

Aziraphale has to keep miracling away his sunburns because he always forgets his hat (or loses it)

Edit because this is more important to me than it should be lol: not an AU! They're still Angel and Demon, it's merely canon-divergent I would say.

[sacramentohistorymuseum]

On May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads met at Promontory Summit, Utah, completing the Transcontinental Railroad. Railroad construction of the eastward bound Central Pacific began at the foot of K Street in Sacramento on January 8, 1863.

For the 155th anniversary, Jared letterpress printed one of the many cuts of a locomotive that we have in our print shop. This print is available as part of the Sacramento prints bundle in our store! This was printed with black rubber base ink using a 3x5 Kelsey Excelsior tabletop printing press.

[fatehbaz]

In fact, far more Asian workers moved to the Americas in the 19th century to make sugar than to build the transcontinental railroad [...]. [T]housands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work [...] on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. [...] Recruited and reviled as "coolies," their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.

In places where sugar cane is grown, such as Mauritius, Fiji, Hawaii, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, there is usually a sizable population of Asians who can trace their ancestry to India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. They are descendants of sugar plantation workers, whose migration and labor embodied the limitations and contradictions of chattel slavery’s slow death in the 19th century. [...]

---

Mass consumption of sugar in industrializing Europe and North America rested on mass production of sugar by enslaved Africans in the colonies. The whip, the market, and the law institutionalized slavery across the Americas, including in the U.S. When the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s mission to reclaim Saint-Domingue, France’s most prized colony, failed, slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. British emancipation included a payment of £20 million to slave owners, an immense sum of money that British taxpayers made loan payments on until 2015.

Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system.

In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment with “Gladstone coolies,” as those workers came to be known, inaugurated [...] “a new system of [...] [indentured servitude],” which would endure for nearly a century. [...]

---

Bonaparte [...] agreed to sell France's claims [...] to the U.S. [...] in 1803, in [...] the Louisiana Purchase. Plantation owners who escaped Saint-Domingue [Haiti] with their enslaved workers helped establish a booming sugar industry in southern Louisiana. On huge plantations surrounding New Orleans, home of the largest slave market in the antebellum South, sugar production took off in the first half of the 19th century. By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. [...] On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was valued at US$200 million. More than half of that figure represented the valuation of the ownership of human beings – Black people who did the backbreaking labor [...]. By the war’s end, approximately $193 million of the sugar industry’s prewar value had vanished.

Desperate to regain power and authority after the war, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. They, too, looked to Asian workers for their salvation, fantasizing that so-called “coolies” [...].

Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. Bound to multiyear contracts, they symbolized Louisiana planters’ racial hope [...].

To great fanfare, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters spent thousands of dollars to recruit gangs of Chinese workers. When 140 Chinese laborers arrived on Millaudon plantation near New Orleans on July 4, 1870, at a cost of about $10,000 in recruitment fees, the New Orleans Times reported that they were “young, athletic, intelligent, sober and cleanly” and superior to “the vast majority of our African population.” [...] But [...] [w]hen they heard that other workers earned more, they demanded the same. When planters refused, they ran away. The Chinese recruits, the Planters’ Banner observed in 1871, were “fond of changing about, run away worse than [Black people], and … leave as soon as anybody offers them higher wages.”

When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.” That racial reasoning would justify a long series of anti-Asian laws and policies on immigration and naturalization for nearly a century.

---

All text above by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022. [All bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[faeriekit]

TODAYBORDAY IS LABOR DAY

Brought to you by your local children's librarian! 😊

The library today is, obviously, closed. Thank goodness. However, we were open earlier this weekend, and I was grateful to have been given a chance to make a labor day display in the children's department!

And Y'ALL. Pickings were SLIM. Believe it or not, but society at large does NOT like teaching children about worker's rights, unionizing, and negotiations! 😭 Never fear, however, because I, under an extreme time crunch (3pm on a friday right before labor day) came up with a short list on kids' books that might help get thoughts flowing on what Labor Day means to us as a country. Good ol' 'Merica or whatever we're saying these days.

Behold: a kid's labor day reading list! ⬇

The candy conspiracy : a tale of sweet victory is classic "boss gets a dollar, I get a dime" story about the power of labor and bargaining. With candy! 🍫🍭🍬 Quick, sweet, and good enough to eat.

Click Clack Moo: Cows that Type is a great story about negotiating for better working conditions. That's right, the barnyard goes on strike for electric blankets and a diving board in the duck pond! A silly, quick read, told largely by the typewritten letters from the cows themselves. Click Clack, Moo!

Hey, remember when children used to have to work countless hours for pennies a day if that just to possibly die or be permanently disfigured on the job? The traveling camera : Lewis Hine and the fight to end child labor is the story of one man's quest to document child labor all across the country in hopes of finally ending it for good— through the work of the National Child Labor Committee. Remember to thank labor laws for the good they've done in your life!

Every student in the country ought to learn about exactly how many people died unnecessary deaths in the industries before workplace safety laws were implemented nationwide. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire : core events of an industrial disaster is a nonfiction title about the how and whys of this horrific event. The most famous of its kind, we should not forget the people lost due to casual workplace cruelty and the demands of overwork.

Teach children to respect blue collar and working class heroes in Real Superheroes: a celebration of essential workers! From the people who keep our towns and cities free of debris and contaminants to healthcare professionals to emergency services, every down and dirty job is held by someone who keeps our towns up and running. Thanks, everyone! (I also recommend Night Job for the same reasons; very sweet, very good at portraying what a school janitor does as their work.)

I was going to add a book on the Mine Wars in West Virginia, since one recently published for a younger age group, but it was more teen than kid friendly unfortunately so I ended up cutting it. I was able to find another book on a different circumstance, however:

The real history of the transcontinental railroad covers a bevvy of relevant topics from the displacement of Native people in the west, the exploitation of Chinese immigrants, worker's rights, and the lingering ghost of Manifest Destiny that haunts this country to this day. Not every kid is ready for intersectional thinking on racism, xenophobia, and colonization, but at the very least, kids are very good at recognizing when a situation is "fair" or "unfair". Let them chew on this for a little bit and see what conversations come out of it.

Happy Labor Day, everyone! Be safe, be strong, and work in groups!

[romanceyourdemons]

per us law, busses must come to a complete stop and open their doors before crossing any train tracks. i know that this is so that the drivers can both look and listen for oncoming trains, but it gives the impression of giving railroad ghosts a chance to board if they want to. belatedly paying our dues to the thousands of souls lost in the construction of the transcontinental railroad

[knight-a3]

Now we're getting into the realm of OCs. To preface, I was strongly inspired by THIS COMIC. I was also playing with an alternate face design for Random in a couple of these.

Anyway, this is Smokestack!

More below.

I started drawing @mfdragon 's OC, then kept making my own alterations until he became mine. I researched steam-powered locomotives for this y'all. I'll explain in a minute.

Final tidbit of context: I was playing with an alternate design for the Random face, just so it matched the other two a bit more. How I feel about it goes back and forth. I like Random's OG design, but it's just so different from the others that is doesn't quite fit in.

Okay, ramblings and train info dump under the cut. Get ready to learn stuff you never cared about.

So basically, the idea is that an allspark fragment brought some old abandoned steam engine to life. Like in the comic, it used Blitzwing as a blueprint, so Smokestack is the first naturally occurring triple changer. Which also means he doesn't suffer the same mental instability as the previous triple changers, he's just naive in a similar way that Wreck-Gar is. He is neither Decepticon nor Autobot. He's too sweet to be a Con, but he's too loyal to his "Dad" to be an Autobot. He's also full of train facts.

Time for trains info dump! Disclaimer, I'm not at all an expert and I am simplifying.

In the steam era, each locomotive was custom-made, so there weren't any industrial standard models or anything. Different companies had different classing systems at different times. I tried to figure it out once and gave up. Instead, steam engines are categorized by their wheel arrangements. There are leading wheels, driving wheels, and trailing wheels. The driving wheels are the only required ones cuz those are the ones that move it. The leading and trailing wheels are for stabilization and weight distribution. Different arrangements were better for different things, such as freight vs passenger. I don't know the science behind which ones were good at what.

The kind of trains that built the transcontinental railroad were 4-4-0 configurations, commonly called "American Standard" due to their prevalence during the westward expansion. They had two sets(four total) of leading wheels, two sets of driving wheels, and no trailing wheels. Like: <••⊙⊙]▣□□□ They're little guys.

The single most produced type of steam engine was the 2-8-0 "Consolidation". <••⊙⊙⊙⊙]▣□□□□ It was a good multi-purpose design. So I chose to make Smokestack 2-8-0 because it gave me the most wiggle room for when and where I wanted him to originally be manufactured and in service. By making him a random abandoned one, I didn't have to think about what museum pieces could be in the Detroit area (Nobody but me would care, but I got hung up on that for some reason).

Anyway, when he only has one vehicle mode, Smokestack is his original 2-8-0. Once he upgrades to having two alts, he becomes a 4-8-8-4 "Big Boy" <••⊙⊙⊙⊙-⊙⊙⊙⊙••]▣□□□□, which is LARGE. 16 driving wheels, which are at least as tall as a person! The purpose was to have enough power to handle the steep grades in the Rocky Mountains and similarly difficult terrain with heavy loads. These days, rail companies will just hook up multiple diesel engines to the train to get the needed power. There is only one currently functional Big Boy type train, which occasionally does tours. It came by my place on the anniversary of the transcontinental railroad in 2019, but I didn't understand trains enough to properly appreciate it.

Next, I'll be getting into drawing other characters, and making human designs.

[softsoundingsea]

Diego Javier Luis is assistant professor of history at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He is the author of The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (forthcoming, 2024).

Edited by Sam Haselby.

Cape Sebastian in Oregon perches above two forested declivities along a rocky patch of the state’s southern coast. Travel there today, and you are likely to miss a roadside marker that reads:

Spanish navigators were the first to explore the North American Pacific Coast. Beginning fifty years after Columbus discovered the Western continents, Sebastian Vizciano [sic] saw this cape in 1603 and named it after the patron saint of the day of his discovery. Other navigators, Spanish, British, and American, followed a century and a half later.

Standing before this sign, I winced rather predictably as I read ‘discovery’. But simmering beneath my displeasure with this word was a deeper conviction that Sebastián Vizcaíno’s voyage was, indeed, significant, though not in the ways that the sign suggests. Thousands of miles to the east, in Seville, the old centre of the Spanish Empire, I had stumbled upon Vizcaíno’s voyage in the dusty volumes of treasury records for the port of Acapulco, Mexico. Buried in line after line of winding, Baroque script were curious notations – ‘chino’ and ‘japón’ – next to the names of seven sailors that Vizcaíno had recruited for his voyage up the North American coast. To the tune of carriages rumbling through Seville’s cobbled streets and the crinkle of centuries-old pages turning, I read the names again and again:

Antón Tomás Antonio Bengala Francisco Miguel Cristóbal Catoya Agustín Longalo Lucas Cate Agustín Sao

Seven Asian sailors – entombed by an archive and forgotten by human memory – had sailed with Vizcaíno to what is now Oregon. Where in the chronology of Asian American history could these sailors fit? Flip to the beginning of most books on Asian America, and you will find no content earlier than the 19th century. You will be in the world of the Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad, indenture, and the San Francisco and Los Angeles Chinatowns.

These seven names transport us to a different world, a different timeline, a different Asian America. These sailors’ presence off the coast of Oregon predated not just the entire Asian American canon but also the founding of the United States and even of the Thirteen Colonies. The histories of the first Asians in the Americas do not take place in the nations born from the fires of British colonialism but, rather, they guide us to a region rarely considered relevant to Asian American history: Latin America.

Read more...

[alliluyevas]

hello American Girl and/or Mormon history aficionados!! After some of the questions you guys have been sending me/my own personal ruminations, I want to share some of the ideas I have for if AG was going to create a historical Mormon character. (Though, for reasons outlined when I responded to the previous ask about a hypothetical Mormon pioneer doll, I highly doubt AG would go that route and I think there are plenty of valid reasons why they possibly shouldn't.)

That being said, if they did, here are some ideas I think would be interesting or cool. First of all, time frame. I answered the previous anon's question with the assumption that "Mormon pioneer" meant an early Utah settler with a storyline set in the late 1840s or early 1850s. I would actually prefer a slightly later era, and I think that might avoid some of the concerns about two much overlap with Kirsten's era. It also would help fill the forty-year gap between Addy and Samantha's storylines. In terms of narrative gaps, I also think there's a bit of a gap with not having a character whose story is set "out west" in the 19th century. (Kirsten's storyline addresses some issues of westward expansion, but she's really Midwestern, and while Josefina is in a modern-day Southwestern state, in her era that region is not under US political control, which makes for a slightly different narrative.)

Part of the reason why I think not having anything between 1864 and 1904 is such a misstep is that there was so much rapid technological development, population growth, and political/social change during those decades and I feel like we get to see the very beginning of a process with Addy and then we pick up with Samantha when so much change has already happened. I'd like to see a bit of a mid-point, and I think a Western state would be a really interesting place to do that. (Side note: if I wasn't a Mormon history nerd, and if AG didn't already have TWO different 20th century historical characters who live in California, I would say California would be the best setting for an "Old West" character. Utah has a really fascinating history in its own right but is in many ways not particularly representative of the West as a region because the population that settled it was so unique.)

One time period that would be interesting for a Mormon Historical Doll would be the late 1860s. This is still pretty close to Addy's time, but the character would be very regionally and demographically different, of course. A really big element of the technological development in the late 19th century was the expansion of railroad networks, including the Transcontinental Railroad, which was completed in Utah in 1869. It might be really cool to do something with this! Utah Mormons approached the new railroad with both excitement about economic opportunity and some sense of threat to their way of life, which had been shaped by previous geographic isolation from mainstream (and non-Mormon) America. How would a child approach this?

I also think a doll set in the 1880s would be really interesting. This was a really fraught time in Utah history, and the most intense period of anti-polygamy legislation and prosecutions (you'll sometimes hear people call this the Mormon Underground era because so many prominent men went "on the underground" to avoid arrest). In terms of technological and social changes, the advent of the railroad did change Utah society a lot, in part because it enabled a lot more non-Mormons to move to Utah. While still a majority especially outside of Salt Lake City, Mormons were no longer an overwhelming majority and also no longer were able to completely control state politics (partially because the new residents were voting as well, but also because there was a long-term effort by the federal government to install appointed officials to try and break the political power of the church.) So you are looking at a more religiously diverse Utah, a shifting balance of power, and a lot of federal policies viewed by Mormons as oppressive, and corresponding political backlash.

(Note: I would find an 1880s era Mormon doll absolutely fascinating, but it would be likely way more controversial even than the earlier pioneer doll would be, because modern LDS people would be way less enthusiastic about it. The pioneer doll would be from a period of their history that is really culturally glorified whereas a doll from the 1880s would be addressing a period of their history that most everyday non-historian LDS folks often find deeply uncomfortable. The 1860s doll might sort of split the difference, because conflict with the federal government over polygamy would be a more central issue than for an earlier doll but less than for an 1880s doll).

I'm just going to post this for now, but I'll reblog with some further ideas about possible storyline/theme/character choices they could make. I'm trying to clean my apartment lol.

[mercuryislove]

👋👋👋👋👋 what are some of your favorite engines? I am partial to the norfolk and western 611 bc it looks cool as hell and is my dad's favorite engine lol

listen I get trains are typically an old guy thing but WHERE are the train ladies.

[transgenderer]

The term "oyster pirate" appeared in several literary works by Jack London. London usually used the term without explanation ("I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew. And the winds of adventure blew the oyster pirate sloops up and down San Francisco Bay"). Writers about London also use the term without explanation ("he was a sailor, seal-hunter, tramp, fish warden, oyster pirate, cannery worker, jailbird, boxer, and gold digger"), as if everyone knew the meaning of the term.

In the context of Jack London's life, it refers to a specific set of conditions peculiar to the oyster industry in San Francisco Bay in the 1880s. While San Francisco Bay had a native oyster (the same species found elsewhere on the Pacific Coast), it was never very abundant. By the early 1850s, entrepreneurs began importing oysters from Shoalwater Bay (now Willapa Bay), Washington Territory. Native West coast oysters were much smaller and had a different flavor from those from the East coast. When the transcontinental railroad was completed, large fishery companies in the east sold juvenile oysters to San Francisco entrepreneurs who purchased submerged land from the State of California and grew oysters from transplanted Eastern stock.

By the 1880s the handful of competing oyster companies began consolidating into a single monopoly. Their harvest of a private commodity from a public space, the San Francisco Bay, led to an opportunity for oyster pirates. Pirates raided the oyster beds at night and sold their take in the Oakland markets in the morning. The public disliked the Southern Pacific and the oyster growers, and liked cheap oysters. As a result, the oyster pirates had considerable public sympathy and police were reluctant to take action against them.

[blueiscoool]

A STEEL RAILROAD SPIKE CLAD IN GOLD AND SILVER USED IN THE CEREMONY MARKING THE COMPLETION OF THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD, 10 MAY 1869 Unknown, but possibly G.W. Laird, San Francisco, 1869

Driving the last spike. The Arizona Spike—presented at the ceremony marking the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Commissioned and presented by Arizona Territorial Governor Anson P.K. Safford, this was one of four ceremonial spikes used to mark the "meeting of the rails" at Promontory Point, Utah on 10 May 1869. Inscribed on the shaft: "Ribbed with iron, clad in silver and crowned with gold Arizona presents her offering to the enterprise that has banded a continent, dictated a pathway to commerce. Presented by Governor Safford."

135mm (long); 25 x 20mm (head); 11 x 11mm (shaft).

[myemuisemo]

"On the Great Alkali Plain" part 2, from Letters from Watson, arrived in my inbox this morning, bringing with it a predictable cloud of dust from approaching horses (since this isn't a George R.R. Martin novel, so we're not going to introduce characters just to kill them off immediately).

But what a caravan! When the head of it had reached the base of the mountains, the rear was not yet visible on the horizon. Right across the enormous plain stretched the straggling array, waggons and carts, men on horseback, and men on foot. Innumerable women who staggered along under burdens, and children who toddled beside the waggons or peeped out from under the white coverings.

Either we're running late on the Oregon Trail (since Doyle did not have social media to live-blog progress across the dusty waste) or the year 1847 is important, and these are Mormons.

“Shall I go forward and see, Brother Stangerson,” asked one of the band.

These have got to be Mormons.

“Nigh upon ten thousand,” said one of the young men; “we are the persecuted children of God—the chosen of the Angel Merona.”

Tell me you're a Mormon without telling me you're a Mormon.

“We are the Mormons,” answered his companions with one voice.

OMG, they're Mormons.

This makes the geographic names a little dicey -- the Mormon Trail ran through Wyoming, similar but not identical to today's I-80, so the Rio Grande River should be nowhere nearby -- but Doyle didn't have access to Google Maps, and it's not like his readers in the UK would go factcheck. Even with the Transcontinental Railroad completed back in 1869, most places in the Great American Desert were still remote in the 1880s, and California on the far end was still feeling the effects of isolation. Doyle also misspells the Angel Moroni and uses a masculine-ending name on a Sierra, so he's working from popular myth and the memory of things he's read. I wonder how many letters with corrections he received.

(At the time Doyle was writing, "Mormon" was the term used by the group themselves. Since about the 1980s, church leadership started urging the use of "Latter-Day Saints" instead. When I lived in Phoenix, that's near a big LDS population in Mesa, so I wince at using the older term. From here on out, if I'm quoting Doyle, I'll use "Mormon," but if I'm talking, I'll stick to LDS.)

The big reason the LDS wagon train is headed west is because they practiced polygamy at the time, and this was considered both illegal and immoral in larger U.S. society. (That's not a critique of polyamory today, when enthusiastic concept and clear rules are normalized.)

So far Doyle's account of the LDS party is generally positive -- they're organized, efficient, knowledgeable about their surroundings, prepared for danger, and responsible toward people needing rescue, if a bit holier-than-thou -- but I can't believe he's going to handle polygamy with anything other than distaste.

Polygamy is the thing LDS have been known for (to their chagrin after the mainstream LDS church banned it), so at the end of this section, Doyle's original audience is split into two groups:

Readers who have no real idea what a "Mormon" is and accept it as just one more crazy American thing, who now figure Lucy is rescued and wonder what goes wrong later to lead to murder; and

Readers who know about polygamy and are feeling dread for Lucy.