Books by Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes

America's Railroad Age was little more than a decade old when Ralph Waldo Emerson uttered these prophetic words. Railroads exercised a remarkable hold on the imagination. The railroad was not merely transportation; it was a technology that promised to transform the world. This title offers a look at what the iron road created.

The colorful saga of miners and settlers struggling to get from here to there in the days before railroads reached the West is recreated in this book combining historical photographs, advertisements, posters, and contemporary accounts. The author describes in detail the technology of pre-industrial modes of transportation.

Historian Carlos A. Schwantes studies the forces that shaped the history of the labor movement on either side of the forty-ninth parallel and the reason for the eventual demise of the socialist movement in Washington State and its continuing vigor in British Columbia.

It seems difficult even to imagine the modern West without reference to its planes, trains, and automobiles. This title looks at three major ways in which transportation has shaped the great Western landscape. It examines the interconnections between railroad, highway, aviation, and waterways, and between society and modes of transportation.

Idaho is seen as one of the most intriguing and attractive states in the Union. This title illustrates the extent to which Idahoans have always been divided by geography, transportation patterns, religion, and history.