Full metadata
Title
In the unlikely event: danger and the transportation revolution in America
Description
This study is a cultural history of danger, disaster, and steam-powered transportation in nineteenth-century America. The application of steam power to transportation, a globally transformative innovation, had particular influence in the early United States. A vast American continent with difficult terrain and poor infrastructure posed significant challenges, both to individual mobility and to a nation eager to build an integrated economy, a unified culture, and a functional republican government. Steamboats and locomotives offered an apparent solution, their speed and power seemingly shrinking distances between places and expanding mobility and access across space, a process contemporaries and scholars have described as a sort of space-time compression. However, these machines that overcame space also blew up, caught fire, wrecked, collided, derailed, and broke down, killing tens, and often hundreds, of Americans at a time. This dissertation analyzes the ways Americans encountered, interpreted, and adapted to these new dangers, all the while making the technology that created them an ever more essential aspect of their lives. I argue that Americans’ responses to disasters, filtered through the transportation and communication networks created by steam power, constituted a deep, shared reflection about the nature of expanded mobility in a fast-evolving modern America. Though few suffered disaster directly, Americans collectively framed the danger of steam as both a profound national problem and an evocative symbol of modernity. Through public conversations mediated by print, Americans identified susceptibility to danger as inherent to high-speed travel, and, alongside practical safety measures, developed distinctly modern cultural adaptations to understand and manage that danger. By century's end, Americans had cultivated a modern mentality on mobility, technology, and danger: though most Americans never experienced disaster they were intimately aware of it, and though familiar with catastrophe they understood it as unlikely and accepted it as a feature of their modern technological lives.
Date Created
2016
Contributors
- Kuenker, Paul (Author)
- Gray, Susan (Thesis advisor)
- Thompson, Victoria (Committee member)
- O'Donnell, Catherine (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
- American History
- Transportation
- disaster
- Steam power
- Technology
- Transportation
- Steam power plants--United States--History--19th century.
- Steam power plants
- Transportation accidents--United States--History--19th century.
- Transportation accidents
- Steam power plants--United States--Public opinion.
- Steam power plants
- Steam locomotives--United States--History--19th century.
- Steam locomotives
- Steamboats--United States--History--19th century.
- Steamboats
Resource Type
Extent
vi, 350 pages
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.40305
Statement of Responsibility
by Paul Kuenker
Description Source
Retrieved on Jan. 5, 2017
Level of coding
full
Note
thesis
Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2016
bibliography
Includes bibliographical references
Field of study: History
System Created
- 2016-10-12 02:20:19
System Modified
- 2021-08-30 01:21:17
- 3 years ago
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