Rails across the Mississippi : a history of the St. Louis bridge /

The bridge completed over the Mississippi River at St. Louis in 1874, designed by James Eads, has long been recognized as one of the outstanding civil engineering accomplishments of 19th-century America. Its story has been told several times, first by Calvin Woodward's A History of the St. Louis Bridge (1881) and, more recently, by Howard Smith Miller in The Eads Bridge (2nd ed., 1997). Most preceding work focused heavily on Eads's technical accomplishments in constructing the bridge. This volume focuses on the bridge's local political and national business contexts. In this volume, Andrew Carnegie, who played a major role in the financial machinations behind the bridge, has a role as central as that of Eads. Jackson, an urban planner, extensively used Carnegie's surviving papers for the study. Jackson portrays Eads as an egocentric engineer with a dominating personality who was concerned more with building a unique and enduring monument than with keeping costs down and insuring timely completion and profitability. Jackson's work provides a good case study of the lurid financial machinations that were often typical of business dealings in the Gilded Age. The research is thorough, the writing excellent. General readers; lower-division undergraduates through professionals. T. S. Reynolds Michigan Technological University