A model of narrative skill and [an] insightful reinterpretation of the Gilded Age. It is easily the best business history I have read.--Donald Worster "Slate"

A scathing and wonderful new book. [Railroaded] will entertain and outrage readers.--Buzzy Jackson "Boston Globe"

An acute analysis that in failure came success and in many ways the map of the nation.--Scott Martelle "Washington Post"

Imaginative, iconoclastic, immensely informative and mordantly funny.--Glenn C. Altschuler "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"

A different and provocative view of the role of the transcontinentals in developing the American West. Railroaded will no doubt spark lively debate and become required reading for those seeking an insightful and recast history of the transcontinental railroad saga.--Walter R. Borneman "San Francisco Chronicle"

Richard White is one of those rare historians with an unfailing ability to transform any topic he writes about, no matter how familiar that topic might seem. In Railroaded, he tells the story of the western transcontinentals as it has never been told before, with insights that speak as much to our own time as to the nineteenth-century era he explores with such wit and intelligence.--William Cronon, author of Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

When it comes to the American West, there is no other writer like Richard White, a serious scholar with a highly original take on familiar subjects and elegant prose besides. His subject, the making of the transcontinental railroads, is perhaps the pivotal story of the West, but it's not the one we know from movies and myth. It's about the birth of all those things that most trouble us nowadays, a genesis story in which the serpent in Eden is the railroad itself writhing across the continent.--Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell's Roses

This brilliant book will forever change our understanding of the great railroad projects of nineteenth-century America.--William Deverell, director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West

Excellent big-picture, popularly written history of the Howard Zinn mold, backed by a mountain of research and statistics.-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"