| Reading Guide for Week 9 | |
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Americans in the mid nineteenth century could encounter an extraordinary proliferation of promotional boosterism of new transportation technologies: canals, railroads, and river steamboats. In this essay, Peter Shulman examines the utopianism that was applied to another new transportation technology: the ocean-going steamship. In all these cases, transportation went hand-in-hand with trade and with communication, and was thought to represent an unprecedented new modernity of accelerating time and shrinking space — itself imagined to be magically universal, benefitting not private interests but the public-at-large (as rendered magically undifferentiated). In other words, technological modernity was imagined to bring universal empowerment, so that power differentials, inequality, and conflict all might cease to exist, relegated to the past — to history. According to Shulman, however, it did not go as envisioned by 19th-century visionaries. |