King Manor Museum  Talking About History Feet, Hooves, and Rails: Transportation in Nineteenth Century America

Thursday, April 23, 2015  5pm Speaker: Dr. J. Ward Regan Presented in partnership with St. John’s University’s Department of History. Free, reservations recommended: [email protected] or 718-206-0545 x13 Please note the location: St. John’s University 8000 Utopia Parkway D’Angelo Center, Room 206 Jamaica, NY 11439 John Alsop King, Rufus King’s eldest son, was an active supporter of New York’s plank roads, turnpikes and railroads. He served as president of the Jamaica and Brooklyn Railroad Company, the seventh railroad in the United States to use steam locomotives, until 1857; one of the company’s locomotives was named the John A. King in his honor. In 1846, he became a director of the Long Island Railroad Company. As Governor of New York from 1857-1859, he supported the enlargement of the Erie Canal. Appealing to the State Assembly for additional funds so that work could continue, he argued that “the interests at stake [are] too widespread and important to be left for a moment in suspense.” Dr. Regan’s lecture follows the development of transportation from the pre-industrial period to the introduction of the combustion engine in the early twentieth century. The Transportation Revolution, as it is sometimes called, encompassed a wide range of successes and failures, and extends well beyond the invention of steam power. From the era of canal building in New York to the rise of the railroad and later the automobile, Dr. Regan will discuss the technological innovations and ideological shifts that changed transportation and transformed the United States into a world power. He will also address the central role New York City played in this process.   J. Ward Regan has a PhD in US labor and cultural history from SUNY Stony Brook. He has taught history and philosophy at New York University‘s Liberal Studies program since 1993 and has lectured widely on American and European history through the New York Council for the Humanities. His chapter “Thomas Paine: Life During Wartime” was published in the anthology Experiencing the French Revolution, (SVEC, Oxford Univ.2013), an article on transportation in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of the Civil War (ABC-CLIO 2014) and his next book, as editor and contributor, Great Books Written in Prison will be published by McFarland Press.

This Speakers in the Humanities event, which is free and open to the public, is made possible through the sup- port of the New York Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, especially Councilmember Rory Lancman, as well as by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Talking About History is generously sponsored by Astoria Bank.