Word: railroads
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...modern Aeneid. In 1896 a woman named Julia Tuttle came south to visit the charming village that was then called Fort Dallas. She fell in love with town--here Miamians usually add, "of course"--and wrote to her friend Henry Flagler, owner of the Florida East Coast Railroad, begging him to bring his railroad down so more people could visit the area. Flagler laughed; nobody would want to go that far south, he said. Then came the frost of 1896 that destroyed most of Florida's orange crop. The frost didn't reach Fort Dallas, however, and Tuttle...
...BODY at the edge of the railroad tracks refused to stir as the desert wind dragged the sand toward the rusty cliffs. The stiff blond hair stuck in jagged clumps to the forehead, and the two blue eyes glared, dead mirrors at the cloudless sky. They found Neal Cassady like a bloated Buick at the side of the road, when a tailpipe or a radiator couldn't fix him anymore, when a girl or a joint couldn't set him smiling, when his ex-friend Jack or his ex-wife Carolyn couldn't get him to talk...
...economic breaking point, the moment when, as Charles and Mary Beard argued 50 years ago, the urban industrial North seized power from the agrarian South in a "second American revolution." Through cliometrics, says the University of Pittsburgh's Samuel Hays, historians have analyzed such production figures as railroad mileage and steel output, and found that the "takeoff points" occurred earlier, in the 1840s and early '50s. Cliometricians also use voting data to learn, say, the cultural differences between Republicans and Democrats. (Ethnic and religious divisions turn out to be more important than arguments over economic issues...
Excerpt "Once in a while an adult said, 'Your grandfather built the railroad.' (Or 'Your grandfathers built the railroad. Plural and singular are by context.) We children believed that it was that very railroad, those trains, those tracks running past our house; our own giant grandfather had set those very logs into the ground, poured the iron for those very spikes with the big heads and pounded them until the heads spread like that, mere nails to him. He had built the railroad so that trains would thunder over us, on a street that inclined toward...
Grandfather left a railroad for his message: We had to go somewhere difficult. Ride a train. Go somewhere important. In case of danger, the train was to be - ready...