A safe mode of transport today, the railways were far from vehicles of sleepy commute when they first came into service; indeed, accidents were commonplace and sometimes were a result of something far more sinister. In this fresh approach to railway history, Rosa Matheson explores the grim and grisly railway past. These horrible happenings include memorable disasters and accidents, the lack of burial grounds for London’s dead, leading to the ‘Necropolis Railway’, the gruesome necessity of digging up the dead to accommodate the railways and how the discovery of dynamite gave rise to the ‘Dynamite Wars’ on the London Underground in the 1880s and 1890s. Join Rosa as she treads carefully through the fascinating gruesome history of Britain’s railways.

Teen detectives Frank and Joe Hardy have investigated many crimes in their lives, but nothing that hits this close to home. Their best friend died mysteriously after taking down a major crime organization. They must put together the clues to uncover the truth about this shocking crime, but the clues lead them to a stunningly unexpected direction! Written by Ringo-nominated writer Anthony Del Col (Kill Shakespeare, Luke Cage) and with art by Eisner-award winner Joe Eisma (Morning Glories, Riverdale), this gritty and stylish story is a noir that will attract fans of Nancy Drew of all ages.

For most of the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, railroads dominated American transportation. They transformed life and captured the imagination. Yet by 1907 railroads had also become the largest cause of violent death in the country, that year claiming the lives of nearly twelve thousand passengers, workers, and others. In Death Rode the Rails Mark Aldrich explores the evolution of railroad safety in the United States by examining a variety of incidents: spectacular train wrecks, smaller accidents in shops and yards that devastated the lives of workers and their families, and the deaths of thousands of women and children killed while walking on or crossing the street-grade tracks. The evolution of railroad safety, Aldrich argues, involved the interplay of market forces, science and technology, and legal and public pressures. He considers the railroad as a system in its entirety: operational realities, technical constraints, economic history, internal politics, and labor management. Aldrich shows that economics initially encouraged American carriers to build and operate cheap and dangerous lines. Only over time did the trade-off between safety and output—shaped by labor markets and public policy—motivate carriers to develop technological improvements that enhanced both productivity and safety. A fascinating account of one of America's most important industries and its dangers, Death Rode the Rails will appeal to scholars of economics and the history of transportation, technology, labor, regulation, safety, and business, as well as to railroad enthusiasts.

On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. A wave of mass hysteria swept the country, leading to a sensational trial, that culminated in four controversial executions, and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover. Historian James Green recounts the rise of the first great labor movement in the wake of the Civil War and brings to life an epic twenty-year struggle for the eight-hour workday. Blending a gripping narrative, outsized characters and a panoramic portrait of a major social movement, Death in the Haymarket is an important addition to the history of American capitalism and a moving story about the class tensions at the heart of Gilded Age America.

One hundred and thirty-five years after the event, the Tay Bridge Disaster remains the single most catastrophic collapse of a British engineering structure. The fateful day in 1879 shook Britain and the world of engineering to their core and sent a nation into mourning for the seventy-five souls lost to the dark, freezing waters of the Tay River. Here Lumley gives the collapse a much wider perspective than the event of one night by delving into the lives of those lost to the disaster, both passengers and railway workers, against a background of a wider Scottish history. Packed full of personal tales and with more technical appendices for those that wish to further their technical knowledge, The Tay Bridge Disaster is a must read for anyone interested in this poignant event of Scottish and British history.

375 exciting tales of heroism and tragedy drawn from the nearly 150,000 search and rescue missions carried out by the National Park Service since 1872.

"Dynamite harkens back to an era of American capitalism a little less glossy, a little bloodier, and with striking parallels to today."--Feminist Review Labor disputes have produced more violence over a longer period of time in the United States than in any other industrialized country in the world. From the 1890s to the 1930s, hardly a year passed without a serious—and often deadly—clash between workers and management. Written in the 1930s, and with a new introduction by Mike Davis, Dynamite recounts a fascinating and largely forgotten history of class and labor struggle in America’s industrial beginnings. It is the story of brutal exploitation, massacres, and judicial murders of the workers. It is also the story of their response: when peaceful strikes yielded no results, workers fought back by any means necessary. Louis Adamic has written the classic story of labor conflict in America, detailing many episodes of labor violence, including the Molly Maguires, the Homestead Strike, Pullman Strike, Colorado Labor Wars, the Los Angeles Times bombing, as well as the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.