The Ghosts in the Machine in the Garden

Our information ecosystem continues to be heavily influenced by Stanford, and not just through the spin-off search engine that got its start there. In a deeper sense, Stanford, the campus—where a trotting horse named Occident was famously photographed to see if it got all of its feet off the ground—is a heritage site of the modern world.¹ As such, Stanford is a special place to search for its origins and locomotion. Endowed with the accumulated wealth of railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, the University is arguably freighted with all of that cash's past, as are all who live and work there. But with its precipitous ascent to world-class university status, its researchers—like their academic peers at similar institutions around the world—tended to act as if they had earned the license to pursue universal knowledge, unencumbered by embodiment, positionality, or history. Yet even academic institutions can't outrun their past forever, and now Stanford is finally catching up with its own, with the publication of a set of homegrown monumental works that tie into the Pacific Railroad and everything to which it is connected. The University and the grounds upon which it stands are undergoing a retrospective heyday, an overdue interrogation of its past and the railroad that runs through it conducted by its own scholars.

These works include California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History, by Richard White, who is now the Margaret Byrne Professor Emeritus of History at Stanford—so the book can be taken in part as a valedictory statement. While California Exposures builds upon and is shadowed by one of White's previous masterworks, Railroaded (2011), it also runs deeper on both professional and personal levels. White's railroad-related corpus is joined by two books that come out of Stanford's multifaceted Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, spearheaded by Gordon Chang, a professor of history and the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities at Stanford, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a professor of English and the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities at Stanford: their co-edited volume chock-full of new revelations, The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad and Chang's sweeping yet intimate narrative history, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad.

While these three books share a workplace of origin and include some direct reflections on that site, their scope includes the wider worlds in which the campus is situated and implicated. For White, his wider world is the length and breadth of California, as fathomed geographically and mythologically. Fishkin and Chang follow traces of Chinese workers along the line of tracks laid down by their hands from Sacramento to Promontory Point, Utah, and then fan out to follow their lives and connections wherever those lead, including all parts of California and the West, Canada, and China. Each of these books represents innovative approaches to recovering and exploring the storied ways people have transformed and interacted with landscape.

In bringing the landscape into their historical frames, they also all rely at least in part on the medium of photography. White's book is a collaboration with his son, Jesse Amble White, a landscape photographer. Methodologically, Richard White writes California Exposures as a dialogue with his son's contemporary photographs, using them to develop his lucid historical reflections on place and history in the infamously dreamy State. By contrast, the books on the Chinese workers and the railroads use historical photographs...