Learn how Boston overcame a litany of challenges, the greed-driven interests of businessmen, and the great fears of its citizenry to create America’s first subway.
In 1914, the Panama Canal connected the world’s two largest oceans. American ingenuity and innovation had succeeded where the French had failed disastrously, but the U.S. paid a price for victory.
It could have been the start of World War III. Instead, it became the largest humanitarian campaign the world had ever seen. On June 24, 1948, one of the first major crises of the Cold War occurred when the Soviet Union blocked railroad and street access to West Berlin. For nearly a year two million civilians and twenty thousand allied soldiers in the city's western sector were fed and fueled entirely from the air.
On May 27, 1937, 200,000 people thronged to the newly-completed Golden Gate bridge and walked, climbed, skated or cycled across. After 18 years of struggles to complete the bridge, San Francisco's jubilance was unrestrained.
Although fleets of these high speed trains crisscrossed the country by the 1940s, their success was short-lived. The dramatic story of the streamliners is one of remarkable achievements and opportunities lost.
A self-made man and one of America’s greatest engineers, James Buchanan Eads led a life inextricably intertwined with the nation’s most important waterway, the Mississippi River. He explored the river bottom in a diving bell of his own design; made a fortune salvaging wrecks; in the 1870s built the world's first steel bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis; then deepened the river at its mouth, turning New Orleans into the second largest port in the nation. By the time of his death in 1887, Eads was widely acknowledged to be one of the most influential men of his day.
