Good and badĪs time passed, romantic visions of the First Transcontinental Railroad have given way as hindsight revealed both its good and bad elements. imagination not because of what it actually did, but because of what Americans imagined it to be: a symbol of national progress, of American imagination and intrepidity,” Campbell told a recent symposium assessing the railroad’s impacts and sponsored by the Stanford Historical Society and Stanford Continuing Studies. “The Transcontinental Railroad has a place in the U.S. It was the quintessential 19th‑century innovation, reflecting power and promise and replacing the brute strength of human labor with ingenuity. The railroad was also a way of transforming space and time – a transformation that necessitated, for instance, the creation of standardized time zones. Robinson Professor in United States History. That’s because the railroad was not simply a new mode of transportation, according to James Campbell, the Edgar E. After the connection was made, telegraph messages celebrating the accomplishment went out, launching festivities nationwide. In the words of Hilton Obenzinger, associate director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford, the railroad completion was the first mass media event in the United States. University founder Leland Stanford completed the First Transcontinental Railroad with a last tap of a mallet on a ceremonial gold spike. The story goes that on May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad’s tracks from the west were connected to the Union Pacific Railroad’s tracks from the east in Promontory Summit, Utah. (Image credit: Stanford University Archives) Leaders of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroad lines meet and shake hands in this iconic photograph taken by Andrew J.
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