Picturing America for Public Libraries

Project Scholar
Suzanne Ozment, Ph.D.
Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Professor of English
University of South Carolina Aiken

Series Description
In 1876, fewer than fifty years after the first railroad lines were laid in North America, Walt Whitman composed a poem—“To a Locomotive in Winter”—that captured the power and energy of the train, the machine that Whitman hailed as the “Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power-pulse of the continent.” The images in Picturing America suggest ways in which the railway transformed the American landscape and helped determine where settlements and industry would develop.

The readings selected for Making Tracks include an account of the construction of the transcontinental railroad (Nothing Like It in the World). Rising from the Rails explores the stories of the black men—and ultimately women—whose work as Pullman porters not only shaped the quality of train travel in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century but also shaped the black middle class. The cluster of poems by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets offers views of trains and from trains. And in the novel that closes the series (Housekeeping), the aftereffects of a tragic railway accident are passed from one generation to another.

Central Reading List
Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen Ambrose
Poems:
    “I Like to See It Lap the Miles” (PDF) by Emily Dickinson
    “To a Locomotive in Winter” (PDF) by Walt Whitman
    “Window” (PDF) by Carl Sandburg
    “Night Journey” (PDF) by Theodore Roethke
    “Riding the A” by May Swenson
    “January Chance” (PDF) by Mark Van Doren
    “In a Station of the Metro” (PDF) by Ezra Pound
Rising from the Rails by Larry Tye
Riding the Rails (film), directed by Michael Uys and Lexy Lovell
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Related Picturing America Images
8A—Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California
9B—Abraham Lincoln
14B—Brooklyn Bridge, c. 1919–1920
15A—American Landscape, 1930
16A—House by the Railroad, 1925
17A—The Migration Series
18A—The Source of Country Music, 1975
18B—Migrant Mother