After several years of reprocessing, the American Public Transportation (APTA) records are once again open to research with a new and improved finding aid. The records document a pivotal time in the history of mass transportation in the 20th century. Private companies operated nearly all of the mass transportation systems Continue Reading
James J. McDonnell Transportation Collection Available for Research!
Graduate student assistant Eron Ackerman recently completed a finding aid for the James J. McDonnell transportation collection. The collection contains documents, photographs, and publications about highway and interstate construction in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. Recently, researchers have shown particular interest in the documents Continue Reading
Martin Wohl Papers Available for Research!
A finding aid is now available for the Martin Wohl papers. Martin Wohl (1930-2009) was an influential economist most famous for arguing against the heavy rail transportation projects that several cities undertook in the 1960s and 1970s. He worked in the Commerce Department in the early 1960s and taught at Continue Reading
“The Road to Happiness” and Fairfax County, Virginia
This introduction to The Road to Happiness (1924) explains how the producers used Fairfax County, Virginia, as the location but used a different name in the film so that the real county would remain anonymous. Real people that lived in Fairfax County are featured in the film. You can view Continue Reading
Recent Acquisition Chronicles Transportation Development in the U.S. from the 1600s to 1880s
What was the state-of-the-art in terms of cross-country transportation in 1888? How did transport technology evolve over the previous two hundred eighty years? The recently-acquired J.L Ringwalt work entitled Development of Transportation Systems in the United States… addresses those questions in detail. The work covers the entire spectrum of transportation Continue Reading