Content for (simplified) proposal web site model for HIST 325

HOME PAGE
This site is a web-based proposal for a research-based web site on the history of the railroad in the United States.  It includes the content categories, site description and a preliminary bibliography for this topic.



CONTENT COMPONENTS (This is a slightly shortened version of what your proposal should look like.)

The antecedents of the railroad include roads, turnpikes, canals, steamboat, and the steam engine. 

Railroads were initially invented in Britain in the early Nineteenth Century, but by the 1820s American inventors and companies began to adapt them to the particular circumstances of the American environment.  These changes included adaptations to locomotive engines and to the rails used.

The site will also explore the most commonly described technological alternative to the railroad in the United States, the canal.  Some historians and economists argue that more canals could have done a better job more cheaply than railroads.  This site will oppose that contention, using support from a number of primary and secondary sources.

A description of the significant interaction between railroads and American culture and society will be another important aspect of the web site.  Railroads were a key part of the nation’s Transportation Revolution, and as a result, are central to understanding westward expansion, the Market Revolution, the spread of information, and the rise of national politics and an American identity.  The railroad and the locomotive also captured the creative and artistic imagination of many Americans at the time, a cultural phenomenon that will be touched on through the use of paintings and photographs.  Railroad corporations, some of the largest and most powerful businesses of the Nineteenth Century wielded a great deal of power and influence in the American economy and politics, but the site will examine the challenges that they faced from labor unions and some politicians.  The site will also extend into the Twentieth Century to briefly describe the eventual decline of the railroad and its current place in the economy and society of the United States.



SITE DESCRIPTION

Goal – To create a research-based web site on the invention and development of the railroad in the United States.

Audience – College students, high-school students, those interested in railroads.

Layout/Structure of web site
1. Home Page
2. Antecedents
3. Invention
4. Adoption
     a. Adaptation to American environment
5. Impact
     a. Transportation
     b. Economic
     c. Cultural
     d. Political
6. Conclusion
7. Bibliography
8. Endnotes


BIBLIOGRAPHY – (Use Chicago Manual of Style)
[Non-Internet Sources]

Basalla, George. The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Chandler, Alfred D. The Railroads: The Nation's First Big Business. New York: Random House, 1963.

Cowan, Susan. A Social History of American Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Marx, Leo and Susan Danly. The Railroad in American Art. New York: Stourbridge Press, 1975.

Nye, David. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996.

Pursell, Carroll. The Machine in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Stover, John. History of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.



[Internet Sources]

Houk, Randy.  “Railroad Timeline History.” http://www.sdrm.org/history/timeline/ (Accessed January 18, 2005).

Library of Congress.  “American Notes: Travel in America, 1750-1920.” American Memory. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lhtnhtml/lhtnhome.html (Accessed January 18, 2005). 

PBS.  “The American Experience: The Transcontinental Railroad.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/tcrr/ (Accessed January 18, 2005).

Union Pacific Railroad Museum Board of Directors. “UP-History and Photos.” Union Pacific Railroad Museum. http://www.uprr.com/aboutup/history/index.shtml (Accessed January 18, 2005).