The story of the men who build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860's.

In 1848, a group of ambitious American entrepreneurs decided to embark upon a remarkable engineering feat—they would build a railroad across the Isthmus of Panama to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The creation of the Panama Railroad ranks as one the boldest capitalist ventures in the 19th century, and would require battling climate, disease, and geography before it was completed. On a human level, it would transform the destiny of thousands of lives in America, Panama, the West Indies, and Asia, as well as in Ireland. The Panama Railroad provides the first comprehensive account of the railroad's construction, going well beyond the known stories of the titans of industry involved with its construction, such as William Aspinwall, George Law, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. It seeks to correct false claims and address numerous gaps in past histories, and in particular showcases the stories of the ordinary Irish workers willing to travel halfway around the globe to pursue an uncertain future and a perilous undertaking in the hopes of escaping the devastating aftermath of the Great Famine of 1845–49.

Excerpt from The Union Pacific Railway: A Study in Railway Politics, History, and Economics The work of the student of history has heretofore been confined almost wholly to the political, religious and liter ary development of peoples; their industrial development has been subjected to inexcusable neglect. Yet the pillars of the dominance of the anglo-saxon race are its superior industrial attributes. What a people accomplishes industrially and how it accomplishes it. Go far to determine how it will be governed, what it will think and feel, and what it will write. The freedom of the individual that was the product of the eighteenth century has been more emphatically man ifested in the field of industry than in any other field of human activity. The growth of constitutional government in England is easily traced to the want of harmony be tween the Old political status and the newly developed indus trial status of English society. The increasing tendency to submit international disputes to arbitration is attributable not so much to a more enlightened repugnance to warfare as to the mere human fear of destruction of wealth and interfer ence with industries occasioned by it. The Annapolis Con vention had its origin in the desire of the American states TO consider how far a uniform system in their commer Cial relations might be necessary to their common inter ests. The slavery question was largely an industrial ques tion, and its solution was industrial, not political or moral. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Guangdong -- Gold Mountain -- Central Pacific -- Foothills -- The High Sierra -- The Summit -- The Strike -- Truckee -- The Golden Spike -- Beyond Promontory.