The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume 2
The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume 2

Author: Albert J. Churella

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2023-11-21

Total Pages: 1621

ISBN-13: 0253066379

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By 1933, the Pennsylvania Railroad had been in existence for nearly ninety years. During this time, it had grown from a small line, struggling to build west from the state capital in Harrisburg, to the dominant transportation company in the United States. In Volume 2 of The Pennsylvania Railroad, Albert J. Churella continues his history of this giant of American transportation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the world's largest business corporation and the nation's most important railroad. By 1917, the Pennsylvania Railroad, like the nation itself, was confronting a very different world. The war that had consumed Europe since 1914 was about to engulf the United States. Amid unprecedented demand for transportation, the federal government undertook the management of the railroads, while new labor policies and new regulatory initiatives, coupled with a postwar recession, would challenge the company like never before. Only time would tell whether the years that followed would signal a new beginning for the Pennsylvania Railroad or the beginning of the end. The Pennsylvania Railroad: The Age of Limits, 1917–1933,represents an unparalleled look at the history, the personalities, and the technologies of this iconic American company in a period that marked the shift from building an empire to exploring the limits of their power.

Visions of Belonging
Visions of Belonging

Author: Julia B. Rosenbaum

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780801444708

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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depictions of New England flooded the American art scene. Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, and Julian Weir, and other well-known artists produced images of quaint villages, agricultural labor, scenic rural churches, and the distinctive New England landscape. Julia B. Rosenbaum asks why and how a range of artists--including Impressionist and Modernist painters and sculptors--and exhibitors fashioned this particular vision of New England in their work. Against the backdrop of industrialization, immigration, and persistent post-Civil War sectionalism, many Americans yearned for national unity and identity. As Rosenbaum finds, New England emerged as symbolic of cultural and spiritual achievement and democratic values that served as an example for the nation. By addressing the struggles for national unity, the book offers a new interpretation of turn-of-the-century American art. Ultimately, Visions of Belonging demonstrates how the local became so important to the national; how art was crucial to the formation of national identity; and how internal nation building takes place within the realm of culture, as well as politics. And even as later artists, such as Georgia O'Keeffe, challenged New England's cultural hegemony, the appeal of linking regional identity to national ideals continued in distinctive ways.Beautifully illustrated with color plates and almost sixty halftones, Visions of Belonging explores the interplay between art objects and the shaping of loyalties and identities in a formative phase of American culture. It will appeal not only to art historians but also to anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century studies, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, American studies, New England history and culture, and American cultural and intellectual history.