Since the advent of train travel, railways have compressed space and crossed national boundaries to become transnational icons, evoking hope, dread, progress, or obsolescence in different cultural domains. Spanning five continents and a diverse range of contexts, this collection offers an unprecedentedly broad survey of global representations of trains. From experimental novels to Hollywood blockbusters, the works studied here chart fascinating routes across a remarkably varied cultural landscape.
A World History of Railway Cultures, 1830-1930 is the first collection of primary sources to historicize the cultural impact of railways on a global scale from their inception in Great Britain to the Great Depression. Its dual purpose is to promote understanding of complex historical processes leading to globalization and generate interest in transnational and global comparative research on railways. In four volumes, organized by historical geography, this scholarly collection gathers rare out-of-print published and unpublished materials from archival and digital repositories throughout the world. It adopts a capsule approach that focuses on short selections of significant primary source content instead of redundant and irrelevant materials found in online data collections. The current collection draws attention to railway cultures through railroad reports, parliamentary papers, government documents, police reports, public health records, engineering reports, technical papers, medical surveys, memoirs, diaries, travel narratives, ethnographies, newspaper articles, editorials, pamphlets, broadsides, paintings, cartoons, engravings, photographs, art, ephemera, and passages from novels and poetry collections that shed light on the cultural history of railways. The editor’s original essays and headnotes on the cultural politics of railways introduce over 200 carefully selected primary sources. Students and researchers come to understand railways not as applied technological impositions of industrial capitalism but powerful, fluid, and idiosyncratic historical constructs.
Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2 (B), University of Bamberg (English and American Literature Studies), course: Proseminar The Geography, History, Folklore, and Literature of American Transportation, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction The building of the first Transcontinental Railroad marks one of the highlights in American History. Nearly 20,000 workers, mostly immigrants or Chinese, especially engaged for this job, had build a line stretching from Omaha, Nebraska, to the eastern boundary of California within just six years. This largest project in the history of American transportation cost about $ 50 Mio., a number not reached ever before. Huge discussions preceded the project, even more were held afterwards. This termpaper will deal with the preparations for, the actual work and the consequences of this enormous construction. [...]
In the last twenty-five years, the explosive rise of car mobility has transformed street life in postsocialist cities. Whereas previously the social fabric of these cities ran on socialist modes of mobility, they are now overtaken by a culture of privately owned cars. If Cars Could Walk uses ethnographic cases studies documenting these changes in terms of street interaction, vehicles used, and the parameters of speed, maneuverability, and cultural and symbolic values. The altered reality of people’s movements, replacing public transport, bicycles and other former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility with privatized mobility reflect an evolving political and cultural imagination, which in turn shapes their current political reality.
As a vehicle to convey both the history of modern China and the complex forces still driving the nation’s economic success, rail has no equal. Railroads and the Transformation of China is the first comprehensive history, in any language, of railroad operation from the last decades of the Qing Empire to the present. China’s first fractured lines were built under semicolonial conditions by competing foreign investors. The national system that began taking shape in the 1910s suffered all the ills of the country at large: warlordism and Japanese invasion, Chinese partisan sabotage, the Great Leap Forward when lines suffered in the “battle for steel,” and the Cultural Revolution, during which Red Guards were granted free passage to “make revolution” across the country, nearly collapsing the system. Elisabeth Köll’s expansive study shows how railroads survived the rupture of the 1949 Communist revolution and became an enduring model of Chinese infrastructure expansion. The railroads persisted because they were exemplary bureaucratic institutions. Through detailed archival research and interviews, Köll builds case studies illuminating the strength of rail administration. Pragmatic management, combining central authority and local autonomy, sustained rail organizations amid shifting political and economic priorities. As Köll shows, rail provided a blueprint for the past forty years of ambitious, semipublic business development and remains an essential component of the PRC’s politically charged, technocratic economic model for China’s future.
This book contributes to recent debates in transnationalism, mobilities and migration studies by offering the first in-depth sociological examination of the global phenomenon of action sports and the transnational networks and connections being established within and across local contexts around the world.
This book approaches Silk Road studies from within the microcosm of China’s Southwest avant-garde arts sector in order to approach the macrocosm of China’s cultural heritage and creative industry influence worldwide. While reading China’s cultural hegemony and its attendant ideologies as ‘shaping’ memory and history throughout New Silk Road regions, the book includes new regional research from within China's borders, as well as throughout New Silk Road regions. With twenty years of experience in China, Sophia G. Kidd fills a void in discussions of the New Silk Roads (NSR) which fail to underscore the importance of the initiative’s people-to-people component. Cultural diplomacy aids cooperation between New Silk Road Regions by reducing ‘cultural discount’ of Chinese cultural exports, i.e., ideas and values, creating a shift of geo-cultural thinking to come. This book will prove illuminating for students of the arts and soft power in greater China.
The majority of books in English on historic building conservation and heritage preservation training are often restricted to Western architecture and its origins. Consequently, the history of building conservation, the study of contemporary paradigms and case studies in most universities and within wider interest circles, predominantly in the UK, Europe, and USA focus mainly on Europe and sometimes the USA, although the latter is often excluded from European publications. With an increasingly multicultural student body in Euro-American universities and with a rising global interest in heritage preservation, there is an urgent need for publications to cover a larger geographical and social area including not only Asia, Australia, Africa and South America but also previously neglected countries in Europe like the new members of the European Community and the northern neighbour of the USA, Canada. The inclusion of the ‘other’ in built environment education in general and in building conservation in particular is a pre-requisite of cultural interaction and widening participation. International Heritage and Historic Building Conservation assesses successful contemporary conservation paradigms from around the world. The book evaluates conservation case studies from previously excluded areas of the world to create an integrated account of Historic Building Conservation that crosses the boundaries of language and culture and sets an example for further inclusive research. Analyzing the influence of financial constraints, regional conflicts, and cultural differences on the heritage of disadvantaged countries, this leading-edge volume is essential for researchers and students of heritage studies interested in understanding their topics in a wider framework.
