before being repeated again and again with other large-scale enterprises. The various authors approach their subject from differing perspectives, though these perspectives are not always exclusive of the others and may instead be seen as complements to them.
The book by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. is a good starting point because he offers not only a personal assessment of the era and of the history of the railroads but also a number of primary-source readings to bolster his arguments and to provide a background to the era and the issue. He accepts readily that the railroads brought bout economic change in the American landscape and that they did this through a technological transformation of transportation and communication beginning in the 1830s and continuing through the rest of the century. He notes at the outset that this new business brought about a profound alteration in the existing patterns of American agriculture, industry, and commerce:
Besides stimulating national production and income, the new forms of transportation, particularly the railroad, helped to create new economic methods and institutions that were essential in guiding and shaping the American drive to industrialism (Chandler 3).
The railroad made transportation and communication less costly than they had ever been, and the telegraph which accompanied the growing railroad meant almost instantaneous communication to nearly every part of the nation. Chandler argues that the railroad was America's first big business and created new patterns of economic and business activity and new institutional forms for business.
This is perhaps the real contribution of the railroads to business history, says Chandler, along with the changes the railroad brought to business as a whole and to migration patterns in the New World. Because of the railroad, more and more people began moving into previously uninhabited regions of the vast territories of the West. The ...