Railroad Nation: The Art of Selling America, 1825-1925

＂From passenger tickets, wall calendars, and advertising posters to train orders and bills of lading, railroads have left a colorful paper trail across America. In Railroad Nation, historian Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes collects a broad array of public-facing documents showcasing the railroad industry’s incredible variety of eye-catching illustrations to enliven their timetables and promotional brochures. Schwantes traces the evolution of railroad commercial art from drab black-and-white broadsides and text-only advertisements that the early railroads placed in local newspapers to the riotous mâelange of color graphics in the early twentieth century, when the visual appeal of public timetables and their thousands of different brochures enticed settlers to create farms, ranches, and towns alongside newly laid tracks＂--

Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes is author or editor of twenty books, including Electric Indiana: The Rise and Fall of the World’s Greatest Interurban Railway Center, 1893-1941, and (with Peter Hansen and Don Hofsommer) Crossroads of a Continent: Missouri Railroads, 1851-1921. He grew up in Greenfield and Indianapolis, Indiana, and now lives in Missouri. He is Saint Louis Mercantile Library Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he taught undergraduate and graduate history for exactly fifty years.