Haunting History: Gordon Chang’s Writing History without Documents: Chinese Railroad Worker Ghosts and American History
The building of the Transcontinental Railroad in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) was a symbol and achievement of unification, of future imperial growth. In his USSO Book Hour Talk, Writing History without Documents: Chinese Railroad Worker Ghosts and American History, Stanford historian of Sino-American relations Gordon Chang stated that so much of American history is railroad history. Most railroad history as American history is nationalistic, triumphalist, and technologically driven, focusing on ‘great white men’ and machines. In the name of Western expansion and “civilization,” technology changed Americans’ understanding of time, space, and distance. Paradoxically, the railroad simultaneously united and divided, connected and disconnected. A technologically advanced America in the late-nineteenth century was also the America of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Railroad history simultaneously involves the building of infrastructure and the ways in which a post-slavery America remained segregated after Reconstruction (Zoom 1:08:00-1:13:00). Moreover, it is also a […]