The Railway Age and After: Labor, Social, and Cultural History

A substantial number of railroad works cover the related topics of labor, social, and cultural history. Railroads and the American People by this author provides a general overview of these histories. An excellent introduction to workers in the industry that is more focused on labor and labor relations is Walter Licht’s Working for the Railroad. There are also several well-received studies of labor strikes. These include Shelton Stromquist’s A Generation of Boomers; Robert V. Bruce’s 1877: Year of Violence; The Great Strikes of 1877 from editor David O. Stowell; Jack Kelly’s The Edge of Anarchy; Donald L. McMurray’s The Great Burlington Strike of 1888; David Ray Papke’s The Pullman Case; and Colin J. Davis’s Power at Odds.

Little has been written in either article or book format about specific occupations, although this author studies the front-line depot agent in The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience. Given the rise of interest in minority groups during the past half century, namely African Americans, Chinese Americans, and Latino/a Americans, scholars have extensively examined the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Comprehensive works include Eric Arnesen’s Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality; Beth Thompkins Bates’s Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945; Jack Santino’s Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters; Larry Tye’s Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class; and Erik K. Washington’s Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal. Chinese railroad laborers have largely been the subject of article-length pieces but are covered in histories of the first transcontinental railroad. These preeminent volumes include John Hoyt Williams’s A Great and Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad; David Haward Bain’s Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad; and Stephen E. Ambrose’s Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869. Latino railroad workers have been the topic of two recent works: Erasmo Gamboa’s Bracero Railroaders: The Forgotten World War II Story of Mexican Workers in the U.S. West and Jeffery Marcos Garcilazo’s Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870–1930. Euro-American railroaders are the focus of James H. Ducker’s Men of the Steel Rails: Workers on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, 1869–1900 and Paul Michel Taillon’s Good, Reliable, White Men: Railroad Brotherhoods, 1877–1917. A rare look at “boomers,” railroaders who moved from job to job usually as brakemen and firemen, can be found in a book edited by this author, Brownie the Boomer: The Life of Charles P. Brown, an American Railroader.Women in railroading have not been extensively studied. Amy G. Richter has written an insightful social history, Home on the Rails: Women, The Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity. Women, who served as telegraphers, often for Western Union and Postal Telegraph and as station agents, are considered in Thomas C. Jepsen’s My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office, 1846–1950 and Ma Kiley: The Life of a Railroad Telegrapher. Sheila Wood Foard’s Harvey Girl investigates females employed by the Fred Harvey Company at its eateries, located mostly along the Santa Fe line.   

Works relating to travel cover a variety of topics. One of the best is John H. White, Jr.’s Wet Britches and Muddy Boots: A History of Travel in Victorian America. Theodore Kornweibel, Jr. provides useful insights into how African Americans experienced railroad travel in Railroads in the African American Experience. A related study that deals with the once ubiquitous hobo who often “rode the rods” is John Lennon’s Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869–1956. Charity Ann Vogel describes one of the worst railroad accidents in American history in The Angola Horror: The 1867 Train Wreck That Shocked the Nation and Transformed American Railroads.