transcontinental railroad

Chinese immigrants sacrificed to create America's first transcontinental railroad. Its completion contributed to a backlash that led to immigration clampdown.

Denied the free meals of their Irish counterparts, Chinese laborers learned to thrive on their own.

Historian Richard White on the greed, ineptitude and economic cost behind the transcontinental railroads, and the implications for infrastructure policy today.

Researchers discovered the remains of a mid-19th century house, a centuries-old Chinese coin and other traces of the short-lived town of Terrace.

The swift, often comfortable ride on the Transcontinental Railroad opened up the American West to new settlement.

Ed Ayers visits the site where the transcontinental railroad was completed. He considers the project's human costs, and discovers how the environment and photography played key roles on the rails.

Archaeologists help modern descendants of Chinese railroad workers in Utah commemorate their ancestors' labor and lives.

On May 10th, 1869, the entire nation was waiting for the moment a silver hammer struck a golden spike, creating the first massive breaking news story.

In 1885, white rioters murdered dozens of their Asian neighbors in Rock Springs, Wyoming. 140 years later, the story of the atrocity is still being unearthed.

In 1873, greed, speculation and overinvestment in railroads sparked a financial crisis that sank the U.S. into more than five years of misery.

As long as the U.S. system privileges private property, thousands of acres of public lands will remain off limits.

Antebellum slaveholders weren't content with an economic and social system based on trafficking in human flesh in the South alone.

A review of “West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire."

An interactive digital history project chronicling how the U.S. Post was the underlying circuitry of western expansion.

The railroad baron and governor of California was starkly contradictory and infamously disruptive.

Railroads and photography, developed largely in parallel and brought about drastic changes in how people understood time and space.

In the late 19th Century, tourism to Europe boomed because wealthy Americans could travel more quickly and safely than ever before on railroads and steamships.

American expansionism goes beyond territory.

In a momentous couple of years, the young United States added more than a million square miles of territory, including Texas and California. 

American empire, bananas, and the Crescent City.

In Lincoln’s view the West represented a space for opportunity, especially for the citizen-soldiers returning to their prewar pursuits.

Lee's life and work suggested that Asian American identity did not possess—and did not need—any underlying reality beyond solidarity.

Lincoln's wartime governance had dire, and longstanding, economic consequences.

For decades, salmon, catfish, and trout traveled in America's fleet of "Fish Cars."

Remembering Asian-American activists Corky Lee and Yuri Kochiyama.

The aesthetics of virtual reality, and its promise of “magical” embodied experience, can be found in older experiments with immersive media.

Generations of Asian Americans have struggled to prove an Americanness that should not need to be proven.

Lincoln protected thousands of acres of California forest and wanted to restore the nation’s battle-ravaged countryside before he was assassinated.

The original cowboys were actually Indigenous, Black and Latinx, but that's not what Hollywood has generally led us to believe.

Before California was West, it was North and it was East: an arrival point for both Mexican and Chinese immigrants.