Description
Book SynopsisAlternative Tracks reveals a nineteenth-century rival to this political economy-an equally efficient and more democratic system of regional railroads regulated according to republican principles.
Trade ReviewA lean but provocative, timely, insightful, and forcefully written challenge to the conventional wisdom about industrial America's political economy. -- Ellis W. Hawley Review of Politics [A] model of sophisticated social science history... Berk forcefully rebuts the assumption found in nearly all historical accounts that the railroad structure that developed was inevitable... As effectively as anyone has, he makes a formidable case that it could have been otherwise. -- William Roy Contemporary Sociology Berk has offered some powerful questions for future scholars to keep in mind, and no student of railroad history or the history of business can afford to overlook this book. -- Mark Wahlgren Summers American Historical Review An ambitious effort to make sense of how the modern American state was fashioned. -- Richard A. Harris American Political Science Review Berk's concise volume... provides a reinterpretation along corporate liberal lines of the factors leading to the rise of the great interregional railroad systems in America during latter half of the nineteenth century. -- Paul J. Miranti Business History Review
