This is a really interesting history of the early railroad period in the United States and a very fun read. The book itself is innovative and the approach taken by Craig Miner is certain to be utilized in a variety of historical works in the years to come. For us older scholars, the new digital age can be daunting but opens up vistas that heretofore were almost out of reach. Even obscure older books can now be found thanks to Amazon and digital libraries of old newspapers can be read without a long and tiring airplane trip to an archive containing spooled microfilms. It is a sea change and Miner takes full advantage of it.

What Miner does is mine the increasingly large digital archives of newspapers and periodicals from the early to mid-nineteenth century for every article or letter about the new railroads that burst upon the scene in the late 1820s. He weaves these first person accounts of all aspects of the new and revolutionary technology into a narrative of the effects the railroads had on American life. Miner does not just rely on the digital archives as rich as they are. He also has a host of traditional references to books and articles written by economic, technology, and social historians of more recent vintage.

Miner has organized his material into an introduction and 14 chapters ranging from the earliest experience with the cog railways in the 1820s to the passage of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. The first chapter deals with the B&O and illustrates the usefulness of Miner's approach. Not every newspaper has been digitized and the records of some newspapers are entirely lost. However, newspapers reprinted material from other newspapers and letters so that information about the B&O's earliest days can be gleaned from sources as far away as New England. Important firsthand accounts of the people at the time are not irretrievably lost. What Miner's approach does is take this mosaic of widely scattered firsthand accounts and weaves it into more traditional historical work to give a compelling picture of how ordinary people reacted to the new railroad. We learn, for example, that as soon as the B&O reached Ellicott Mills, it became what we would call in modern English a tourist attraction. People wanted to ride the train. It was fascinating to move along at 10 miles per hour or so looking at the “remote” countryside. Miner fleshes this out by bringing into his narrative the facts of the B&O's construction. It was slow but of the highest order. The masonry works were absolutely first rate and many survive to this day and are still in active use.

Although Miner is not trying to write a “peoples history” or a social history of the “little people,” what you take away from many of the chapters is how profoundly the early railroads affected the average person. Chapter 5 “Riding the Rails” is a reminder that riding the early trains was no picnic and puts the train of annoyances one must put up with to fly in our time in some perspective. We have it easy compared to 1840, but then again traveling by coach in 1800 was even worse.

Perhaps the most important contribution of this book is Miner's considerable coverage of the development of the Southern railways. He argues, correctly in my view, that the Southern railroad system was more developed than some histories suggest and that the South was not as agrarian as it appears from endless showings of “Gone with the Wind.” Chapter 9 “Southern Strategy” shows how vigorously Southerners pursued the construction of first local railroads, and then larger systems that crossed state lines. Although not as extensive as the northern network by the outbreak of the Civil War, it was extensive and in many ways the financing was sounder. Miner compares the regions of the United States to each other in most of the chapters so that material on the Southern railroads appears throughout the book.

Chapter 11 “Panic” is concerned with the Panic of 1857 and the role of railroad finance in the panic. The chapter has lots of good examples of shady railroad financing schemes that are familiar fare for most historians of railroads. However, these lead into a discussion of the 1857 Panic and the many contemporaneous quotes are eerily reminiscent of the recent collapse of our own financial bubble from 2006 to late 2008. Then as now, the “smart” people were as easily deceived as everyone else and they seemed to have learned no lessons from the Panic of 1837 that occurred only 20 years before.

In his final chapter, Miner wisely avoids the overwrought (and now standard) discussions of technology as the spoiler of mankind's simple paradise. Miner states his goal forthrightly: “This book is a history, not a sociological study or a philosophical tract…it is a history of the interaction of technology and public opinion…” (p. 261). Technology will always be disruptive and especially so if inventors and entrepreneurs are rewarded for their creativity. The “perennial gale of creative destruction” sweeps us along. Miner comes close to answering Maury Klein's question: What is the meaning of the railroad in American life? Well, we love trains. We put men on the moon. If challenged, we can do anything.