About this Event
David Alff launches his new book The Northeast Corridor, the first comprehensive history of perhaps the most famous American railway. In conversation with Ann Kjellberg.
PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.
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All aboard for the first comprehensive history of the hard-working and wildly influential Northeast Corridor.
Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor reveals how freight trains, commuter rail, and Amtrak influenced—and in turn were shaped by—centuries of American industrial expansion, metropolitan growth, downtown decline, and revitalization.
Paying as much attention to Aberdeen, Trenton, New Rochelle, and Providence as to New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Alff provides narrative thrills for history buffs, train enthusiasts, and adventurers alike. What’s more, he offers a glimpse into the future of the corridor. New infrastructural plans—supported by President Joe Biden, famously Amtrak’s biggest fan—envision ever-faster trains zipping along technologically advanced rails. Yet those tracks will literally sit atop a history that links the life of Frederick Douglass, who fled to freedom by boarding a train in Baltimore, to the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, which is expected to be the newest link in the corridor by 2032.
Trains have long made the places that make America, and they still do.
David Alff is associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture,1660-1730.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post, a newsletter-based book review. She was on the editorial staff of the for many years and founded the literary magazine . She is the literary executor of the poet Joseph Brodsky and editor of several editions of his work.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York, United States
USD 0.00