Dr. Amanda Butler to Speak in this week’s Friday STEMinar
Friday STEMinar continues on Friday March 27 at 3pm in Library 103, when we welcome Dr. Amanda Butler, who will be giving the following talk. Refreshments at 2:30 pm in Library 103.
Empty Promises: Railroad Capitalism and Toxicity in the First Gilded Age
For almost 20 years, the Northern Pacific railroad infrastructure propelled the town of Winnipeg Junction, MN into a prosperous boomtown full of saloons, hotels, businesses, farms, churches and homes at the turn of the 20th century. But by 1910 the rail monopoly manipulated the fate of an entire town by moving its tracks, which resulted in a landscape that must have felt empty. Buildings were relocated, townspeople who lost their fight against the monopoly had moved on or dispersed, and only the building foundations were left. Yet the site is packed with the physical remnants of an early mass-production commodity and consumerist age. The excessive rubbish of capitalism literally filled in the empty foundations. Their recovery today reveals stories of toxicity and excess characteristic of the first Gilded Age.