Diversity in Piracy

A swashbuckling start to a month highlighting women in transportation history with an interview of the author of a recent book on women pirates and their lives on the high seas. Like male pirates, they have disrupted maritime transportation for centuries. In addition, at the height of the British Empire, they risked being transported to …

Subway Stories

Lost subways seem like a natural follow up to a recent Moving History post about -Cincinnati's built-but-never-used subway, and fortuitously there is a recently published book with just this title, Lost Subways of North America. In the book, Jake Berman "surveys the rail networks of Dallas, Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and many others in …

Bicycling for Ladies: The Early Days

This is a light-hearted but thoughtful reflection by long-time blogger Maria Popova on an 1896 illustrated tract and testimonial called Bicycling for Ladies by M.E. Ward. Popova writes, "What emerges is both a charming time-capsule — reminding us how much of what we take for granted today was once a new frontier of daring advanced …

Mega-Planning for Mega-Projects: Learning from Past Knowledge

Paul Lewis, a Principal at Deutsche Bahn, writes in an Eno weekly about the value he has found in 19th century railroad textbooks. Long-lived mega-projects face and raise similar challenges whenever they are undertaken, and Lewis found numerous insights and lessons in a crumbling 1885 volume he encountered while culling his library. Project oversight, sufficiency …

Early Intersectionality: Being Black and Female on the Early American Railroads

Today's post returns to Lee Vinsel's Peoples & Things podcast about people and technology in use. Lee recently spoke to University of Buffalo Professor of English Miriam Thaggert about her recent book Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad. Her research relied on a variety of innovative sources and methods to learn …

Evolving Technology and Shifting Policy in Commercial Aviation

In this podcast, longtime airline analyst and executive Barry Humphreys talks with Aviation Week editor Karen Walker about his new book, The Regulation of Air Transport from Protection to Liberalization and Back Again. A long era of cost saving innovation may be over for a transportation sector that has usually struggled to operate with consistent …

A Conversation with Mia Bay about Her Recent Book, Traveling Black, A Story of Race and Resistance

Mia Bay, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about her book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2023), with the host of Peoples & Things, Lee Vinsel. From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, Traveling Black explores when, how, and why …

Book of the Month: Atlantic Automobilism

Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car 1895-1940 By Gijs Mom Berghahn Books (2015)   This monumental book recaps the first decades of the personal car. It presents the evolution from its beginning as a toy for the rich and adventurous towards a generalized means of transportation accessible to the masses. It combines various …

Classic book of the month : The Box

Following our previous post on barrels, here is our classic book suggestion, this time on the shipping container. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson was published in 2006. The book tells the great story Malcom McLean, who perfected the shipping container, the ever …

Wood, Whiskey and Wine – – – New book review about barrels

 Interesting review by Wayne Curtis in last weekend’s WSJ of a book re a transportation tool we never think of -- the lowly barrel. Before barrels there were amphoras and other crockery for storage, followed by steel drums, sacks and ultimately the container.  The barrel was the standard tool of storage for a period with …