How the modern railroad corporations and the state operated symbiotically

Review of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White

White introduces this fascinating study with an unusual motive: what we have been told about railroads, he claims, is flatly untrue and, because the reasons for this are very interesting, he wants to explore them. Railroads were not, he says, forewarnings of the future, our modern era. They may have introduced technologies that revolutionized American l…