America Transformed: Engineering and Technology in the Nineteenth Century

From a fledgling agrarian nation clinging to the Atlantic seaboard in 1800, the United States by the 1900s was the world’s leading industrial nation, manufacturing a third of the world’s industrial output. Through nearly 200 photographs and drawings, America Transformed: Engineering and Technology in the Nineteenth Century highlights not only the obvious icons of achievement such as the Brooklyn Bridge and Erie Canal but also the development of the nation’s industrial, manufacturing, and transportation infrastructure. Development and innovation in mining; textile, iron and steel mills; water treatment, power and irrigation systems, canals, railroads and bridges all served to transform American life. In 1969 the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the American Society of Civil Engineers formed the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) program to document nationally and regionally significant engineering and industrial sites. HAER documentation–in the forms of measured and interpretive drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories–record for posterity the enormous historic engineering and industrial legacy of the United States. Using these resources, Dean Herrin has created a visual sampler of America’s nineteenth-century engineering and technology that illuminates the scope and variety of America’s industrial transformation.