![]() The Railway Journey held up well, although I now saw how the second part really did pale compared to those first few critical chapters. Schivelbusch featured twice on my comprehensive examination reading list. My PhD also returned to railways, but not in the way that I think Schivelbusch would have expected. I ultimately fell back into railway history during my MA, albeit from a material culture and memory perspective. I studied and wrote about Victorian railway travel as an undergrad because of his work. Chapters 3-5, which focus on time and space, are probably more cited than any other work of transportation history (my guess, don't know if this is actually true!). This was how people saw train travel, how they felt train travel, how they loved and feared it. He introduced me to the cultural history of rail travel, which helped me to break away from the technical and economic narratives I had been used to. Whatever aspect of the railways that Schivelbusch wanted to talk about, he did. It's a truly eclectic book: the chapters don't lead logically from one to the next. My mind was blown.Īs I delved deeper into railway history, I bought a used copy of The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, perhaps Schivelbusch's best-known work. The increased velocity of rail travel allowed people to travel further in less time. Using Schivelbusch, Wootton explained how the construction of the railways in Britain had fundamentally changed how people perceived time and space. I first encountered Schivelbusch in the first year of my undergrad in a lecture given by David Wootton on the history of time and space as intellectual constructs. It is no exaggeration to say that, were it not for his work, I might not have completed a PhD. As qualified as any professor, he operated free of institutional constraint, writing the histories he wanted to. Schivelbusch was what many of us dream of being: an independent scholar. I didn't know until this morning, when the New York Times published an obituary. ![]() Unbeknownst to many of us, Wolfgang Schivelbusch died in Germany in March. ![]()
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