Aaron W. Marrs, <i>The American Transportation Revolution: A Social and Cultural History</i> Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024. Pp. 262. ISBN 978-1-4212-4849-7. $64.95 (hardcover).

The proliferation of steamboat companies and railroad lines in the first half of the nineteenth century brought dizzying changes to American life.Overland journeys that in 1810 had required weeks of travel and careful planning by 1860 could be achieved in mere days with the purchase of a ticket.Scholars tend to emphasize the economic implications of these shifting patterns of movement, pointing to the role that fast, regular, mechanized transport played in early industrialization and the spread of plantation slavery.Aaron W. Marrs's new book, The American Transportation Revolution, takes a different tack.Marrs argues that the advent of steam transit altered not only conditions of production but habits of mind in the decades before the US Civil War.His book synthesizes two decades of scholarship on race, gender, technology and mobility while adding new perspectives derived from his deep engagement with nineteenth-century print and material culture.The result is a study of the cultural and social dimensions of steam-powered travel that shows how everyday users adapted these new, transformative technologies to their own ends.At the same time, Marrs shows that the experience and effects of steam travel varied greatly along lines of race, gender and age.Few diarists in pre-Civil War America failed to record their first encounters with steam transport; they recognized the steam engine as a dynamic new force in American life.In the first four chapters, Marrs describes how encounters with this novel technology altered social relations and artistic production in the United States before the Civil War.The steam engine emerged as a metaphor for a fast-paced age.'Steam transit', Marrs writes, 'quickly exploded in the cultural realm to be a conduit for talking about a plethora of topics' (p.102).The language of speed and pressure became standard features of the American vernacular, and schoolhouse lectures and Sunday sermons deployed the steam engine as a motif.On a more practical level, the commodification of mobilitythe transformation of travel into something provided by a company and purchased with a ticketchanged both the experience and the meaning of travel.Distance itself appeared to shrink with the spread of steam locomotion; travellers marvelled at the prospect of taking their morning tea in one city and their evening meal in another.Commodified steam travel also introduced new kinds of experiences and expectations for travelers.Rail and steam companies' strict schedules underscored the importance of punctuality, for example, and etiquette books instructed readers on how to comport themselves amidst strangers in the confined space of a railroad carriage.The pundits and politicians (mostly white men) who surveyed these changes found it easy to speak of the steam engine as the embodiment of a spirit of progress that they