Engines of Redemption tells the history of a global technology that intersected with the racial particularities of the American South after the Civil War. It is ultimately a story of how a business—the railroad—developed and influenced the evolution of capitalism in the New South, a topic that will please readers of this journal. Yet it is also about the railroad as both a network and an idea. Scott R. Huffard moves beyond the railcar to understand the larger historical forces that brought the corporation to the South and the mentalities and narratives that bolstered and challenged these changes. He transcends debates about the nature of capitalism in the New South by examining “impacts of key elements of capitalism, such as connections, circulation, standardization, rationalization, corporate consolidation, and movement directed by the profit motive” (p. 5). He does this by using railroad archival collections, newspapers, railroad prospectuses, ephemera, and travel narratives. Recognizing that most of his sources privilege white, elite voices, he reads them with a critical eye and includes observations from Black travelers and prominent figures such as Ida B. Wells and James Weldon Johnson. He also uses literature, folklore, and music, from William Faulkner to Johnny Cash. Huffard engages with older scholarship on railroads and the economy of the New South, as well as with the new history of capitalism (NHC), and depicts capitalism as both “an economic system and a culture” (p. 5).

Although Huffard contextualizes the southern railroad within the broader system of national and international political economy, he homes in on local cases because, as recent histories of capitalism have shown, the particularities of time and place matter in the development of capitalism. He contends that the story he tells could only take place in the American South in the 1880s and 1890s, arguing that “railroad companies and their white southern allies exploited the region's racial tensions to paper over the destructive aspects of capitalism and ensure the survival of railroad phantasmagoria” (p. 12). The word “phantasmagoria” appears many times in this book, and the book's first part, “Casting the Spell,” explains the creation of this illusory and idealized railroad. The second part, “To the Netherworld,” is devoted to case studies of the crises that this phantasmagoria obscured.

The first part contains three chapters that lay out the antebellum and Civil War context and explain the role of the railroads in the transition from Reconstruction to the New South. This transition involved North-South reconciliation, industrial standardization, convict labor, and the myth of the South as a refuge from the labor strife happening nationwide. These early chapters introduce a main theme of the book: the relationship among capitalism, the railroad, and white supremacy. Huffard details whites’ use of the railroad to stereotype and criminalize Blacks, who themselves used the railroad for newfound mobility and some degree of empowerment. He uses the diary of Ida B. Wells to illustrate the ability of the railroad to both liberate and segregate. In 1884, Wells attempted to sit in the first-class seat she had purchased, only to be dragged by the conductor to the smoking car. When she filed a lawsuit against the C&O Railroad for denying her what she had paid for, she won; the corporation, however, ultimately triumphed. Hoping to prohibit future passengers of color from defending their right to first-class seats, C&O appealed to the Supreme Court, who sided with the corporation.

The second part delves further into this dark side of railroad building. Four chapters cover train wrecks, crime, the railroad's role in the spread of disease, and the battle between national corporations and local interests. Huffard recasts train robbers as “human embodiments of the powers of capitalism” and investigates newspaper depictions of train wrecks to reveal how corporations developed the mythical figure of a Black train wrecker to deflect blame from themselves (p. 170). The real reason for train wrecks was a lack of capital, technical experts, and regulatory oversight, but in the face of lawsuits from victims and their families, corporations’ growing legal teams shaped the narrative to absolve themselves of responsibility. In general, white supremacy helped destroy anti-railroad sentiment, leading to the triumph of the coalition of conservative Democrats, business-oriented New South men, and northern capital.

In Huffard's telling, this triumph was not a good thing. He agrees with Richard White that the railroad corporation led to environmental destruction, corruption, and mismanagement. As Huffard notes, the rise of the southern railroad made southerners familiar with a major feature of modern capitalism—the large corporation—much to their detriment. Executives of these large corporations could “condemn a town to irrelevancy” with the stroke of a pen (p. 231). The railroad, and capitalism more broadly, were not saviors of the South but instruments of racism and ruin.

Huffard's assessment may be grim, but it is an instructive one. Engines of Redemption represents the best of the NHC by detailing both the cultural underpinnings and the “nitty gritty” of a capitalistic system in a particular time and place. It also contributes to an older historiography on railroads and the southern economy, shedding new light on the downsides of the railroads. This book ultimately reveals the importance of narrative and mythmaking in the evolution of capitalism. Its conclusion jumps from the defeat of Populism by railroad corporations and racism at the end of the nineteenth century to the disingenuous branding of Walmart, Facebook, and Wall Street institutions in the present. Engines of Redemption will be useful to historians of business and the South, and to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of American capitalism.