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The Railroad Journey and the Industrial Revolution: Crash Course World History #214
The Railroad Journey and the Industrial Revolution: Crash Course World History #214
When most people were farmers and had to walk or ride a horse to the next town, the position of the Sun was more important than knowing the exact time. Trains changed that.
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Key Ideas
As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.
Think about the following questions as you watch the video
- How did widespread railways help bring the Industrial Revolution to more people?
- How did railroads shape our ideas of space and time?
- What were some arguments that people in the long nineteenth century used against railroads?
- What effect did industrialization have on our worldview about progress?
- How is the Internet is like the railroad?
: Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History,
: and today, we are returning to a subject
: that could have a Crash Course series all of its own:
: the Industrial Revolution. - Mr. Green, Mr. Green!
: Are you going to do a whole series
: on the Industrial Revolution?
: Because that actually sounds really boring.
: - Yeah, Me from the Past, no, I-I'm a little bit busy.
: I got this movie that's about to film, so, yeah, no.
: But, uh, we are going to talk about, like, a specific
: and essential slice of the Industrial Revolution that also,
: like, pleases my four-year-old self a lot: railroads!
: (imitating railroad chugging) Choo-choo!
: We're going to talk about a small book
: by Wolfgang Schivelbusch called "The Railway Journey."
: So, in this Crash Course World History series,
: we're talking a lot about a lot of different history books
: so that we can approach subjects from a variety of angles.
: We want to introduce you to how exciting history can be
: and also how unsettled it is,
: how many arguments there still are.
: So to be clear I'm not saying
: I agree with everything in this book.
: It's one interpretation of a series of events.
: But it contains a ton of interesting ideas,
: and it's one of those books
: that makes you think differently about the world.
: And it's vitally important that
: we think about the role technology plays in our lives,
: including the technology of railroads.
: (music playing)
: (horse whinnying)
: So, railroads were these big, loud machines
: that people hadn't seen before,
: which makes them a pretty good metaphor for industrialization.
: Also, since not everyone worked in factories,
: railways were one of the few places
: that both middle- and upper-class people
: came face-to-face with industrial machinery.
: You know, if you were a factory worker,
: that stuff was around you all day every day,
: slowly killing your soul, but if you were, say,
: a mortgage broker, your work life hadn't changed.
: It's not like you had a computer.
: But the presence of railroads reminded you
: that you were in a different world
: from that of your parents or grandparents.
: It wasn't just locomotion, though;
: the railway itself changed the idea of an industrial machine
: to include its surrounding infrastructure, right?
: You needed rails and these huge engines.
: You needed timetables and organization.
: That encompassed everything that industrialization was about.
: And since railways changed the lives
: of middle- and upper-class people,
: who tend to write a lot, we know a lot about them.
: And the change was definitely seen as radical.
: For instance, the phrase "annihilation of time and space"
: was a pretty popular one when talking about railways.
: This wasn't just a fancy way of talking about
: how railways sped up travel, but also the way that the railroad
: destroyed traditional relationships with nature.
: I mean, sometimes nature was literally annihilated,
: as when tunnels were cut through hills,
: and depressions were graded
: to make the railroad as straight as possible,
: as if drawn with a ruler.
: But railroads also shaped space and time
: in a manner totally unprecedented in human history
: by, for instance, speeding up travel times,
: which shrunk the world.
: And then they expanded space
: by creating suburbs and new towns.
: In a positive development for 99% of the population,
: railroads changed space too, by opening up
: previously inaccessible, like, vacation spots of the wealthy.
: Then the wealthy migrated further away
: to places only accessible by air travel,
: like, I don't know, Ibiza, but now Ibiza's full of Euro-trash
: because of inexpensive airlines.
: Where will the one percent vacation?!
: Poor rich people, they had to go the Hamptons,
: which aren't even that nice, they're just really expensive.
: And there's the fact that
: railroads literally changed time--
: or at least created the standardization of time.
: Like before railroads,
: time in London was four minutes ahead of Reading
: and 14 minutes ahead of time in Bridgewater.
: Then in 1847, the Railway Clearing House,
: an organization established to regulate rail travel,
: established Greenwich Mean Time as the standard time
: on all rail lines, and in 1880
: it became the general standard time in England.
: So, to be clear, time as you know it is about as old
: as the oldest living person in the world.
: But the most obvious way that railroads changed things
: was travel.
: Until railroads, all travel was powered by muscles,
: either animal or human.
: So, we had a sense of distance as defined by fatigue.
: Like, when your horse died, you had gone a long way.
: Or like your horse, like, sprained a leg going down a hill
: and you had to shoot it.
: Point being for 250,000 years,
: all power was muscle power.
: And unless you could, like, ride a cheetah,
: you weren't going to go faster than about 20 mph.
: So, babies could go really fast,
: because they can ride cheetahs,
: but adults, there's no way, cheetahs weigh, like, 20 pounds.
: As Thomas de Quincy put it,
: "When we are traveling by stage-coach
: "at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour,
: "we can understand the nature of the force
: "which sets the vehicle in motion...
: "and in the course of a day's journey we can appreciate
: "the enormous succession of efforts required
: to transport a loaded vehicle from London to a distant town."
: Although to be fair, De Quincy's ideas about enormous effort
: may have been a bit skewed
: as he also wrote "Confessions of an Opium-Eater."
: Anyway, people were so comfortable with horses
: that some even argued that horsepower
: was superior to mechanical locomotion
: because horses relied more
: on renewable and easily obtained fuel.
: By the way, as you may see in comments,
: there is still a debate about whether horsepower
: or railroads are more carbon efficient.
: Anyway, the romantics at the time saw railroad travel
: as a "Loss of communicative relationship
: between man and nature."
: And some also saw the old technology horses
: as having, like, more soul.
: Mechanical travel was generally seen as a definite economic win,
: since it rendered all transportation calculable,
: and economists love to calculate.
: Railroads also changed the way that we looked at the world.
: Like, literally through a window with nature being this blur.
: And you can argue that, like, watching the world go by
: through a static window kind of prepared people
: for motion pictures and television,
: where we stare at a screen that doesn't move
: and watch a world that does.
: Now, these noisy, coal-powered trains
: affected all the senses but especially vision.
: As Victor Hugo described it in 1837,
: "The flowers by the side of the road
: "are no longer flowers but fleck,
: "or rather streaks of red and white;
: there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak."
: So, many people experienced this landscape as a monotonous blur,
: but for others it was something new and exciting.
: For Benjamin Gastineau,
: the constantly changing view was thrilling.
: "In quick succession it presents the astonished traveler
: "with happy scenes, sad scenes,
: "burlesque interludes, brilliant fireworks,
: all visions that disappear as soon as they are seen."
: That sounds like a great movie.
: All I see when I look out the train window
: is the infinite abyss of meaninglessness,
: and then I plug my phone and open Floppy Bird,
: and everything's okay again.
: And railroad travel also changed human behavior.
: Okay, let's go to the Thought Bubble.
: Since looking at the landscape
: was no longer the same experience,
: and according to the medical journal "The Lancet,"
: "The rapidity and variety of the impressions
: necessarily fatigue both the eye and the brain,"
: many people turned to reading books on railroads.
: For starters, reading was a way for upper-class passengers
: to avoid having to talk with each other.
: European first- and second-class railcars were designed
: to mimic stagecoaches, with passengers facing each other.
: Now, in pre-railroad travel, you knew you were going to be stuck
: with whoever was in your stagecoach,
: so it was important to try to be nice
: and strike up a conversation.
: But the short duration of railroad journeys
: discouraged the formation of rapport between travelers,
: changing our habits and turning reading on the train
: into a necessity.
: Rail travel also brought new fears,
: like, when traveling at the speed of a cannonball,
: it was hard to overcome one's terror of a possible derailment.
: As Thomas Creevey put it, "It is really flying,
: and it is impossible to divest yourself of the notion
: of instant death to all upon the least accident happening."
: So that's why I'm afraid of flying.
: And to be fair, railway accidents were common enough
: that physicians began to document cases of railway spine,
: a condition suffered by people
: who'd come through railway accidents
: with complaints of pain but few or no signs of physical injury.
: By the end of the 1880s, however,
: railway spine gave way as a diagnosis to traumatic neurosis,
: reflecting new ideas in psychology.
: Eventually, pathological explanations
: for what looks like a lot like nervous shock slipped away
: and only the psychological ones were left.
: Thanks, Thought Bubble.
: So new technologies often bring new anxieties,
: because change is terrifying.
: Remember how the internet was going to bring
: an end to reading books?
: Remember how "e-learning"
: was going to replace classrooms,
: and there were going to be all of these "e-teachers"
: who would replace your real teachers?
: But yeah, no, it turns out that
: real-life teachers are pretty great.
: Like Heinrich Heine wrote that railroads produced
: "tremendous foreboding such as we always feel
: "when there comes an enormous, an unheard-of event
: whose consequences are imponderable and incalculable."
: Fortunately, our new, industrial worldview
: associated change with progress.
: Like, this notion that humans move forward,
: that children will have a better life
: than their parents did-- that's new.
: That is... oh, it's time for the Open Letter.
: But first, let's see what's in the globe today.
: Oh no, it's change.
: (whispers): I hate change.
: An open letter to progress.
: One of the reasons I think we're afraid of change
: is that change doesn't really mean progress.
: For the vast majority of human history,
: the lives of children could be much worse
: than the lives of their parents.
: It depended on disease and weather and kings.
: Mostly on disease and weather.
: There was no idea that moving forward
: also meant moving up.
: And I would argue that certainly
: innovation has given us much to be grateful for,
: but there's something to a reluctance to change.
: I love you, progress,
: and you have given me much to be grateful for.
: But a gentle reminder: change doesn't always mean progress.
: Best wishes, John Green.
: So as Schivelbusch puts it,
: "New modes of behavior and perception
: "enabled the traveler to lose the fear
: "that he formerly felt toward the new conveyance.
: "The sinister aspect of the machinery
: "that first was so evident and frightening
: "gradually disappeared, and with this disappearance,
: "fear waned and was replaced by a feeling of security
: based on familiarity."
: Huh, that sounds precisely like my relationship
: with a phone that always knows where I am.
: New technologies often change the way people live
: and perceive the world.
: Like, one example would be the printing press.
: It made knowledge and information available
: as never before, but it only really affected
: a small segment of the population-- at least initially.
: Industrialization was different
: in that it had a profound effect
: on large numbers of people in a very short time.
: And since the dawn of industrialization,
: the pace of this change and the enormity of its impact
: has only increased like, well, like a speeding train, I guess.
: Except it's like a train that gets faster and faster
: until it reaches the speed of light.
: Oh my gosh, what a wonderful idea.
: Somebody call Elon Musk.
: So for most of us, the internet
: is a technology very much like the railroad.
: Like the railroad, the internet in its earliest stages
: was both frightening to detractors
: and exhilarating to its boosters.
: And like the railroads, it has shrunk the world,
: enabling me to communicate with you
: via, you know, the tubes...
: I don't really know how the internet works.
: And it's also changed our perception of time.
: Think about how much sooner you expect a response to an email
: or a text message versus a letter or even a phone call.
: Think about the fact that you can order a phone from China
: and have it arrive at your door in a week,
: and that still feels like kind of a long time.
: In the age of the railroads, to get a phone--
: which didn't exist-- from China to Indianapolis
: would have taken months.
: To get that same nonexistent phone from China to Indianapolis
: in 1700 would have taken more than a year.
: And then you turn it on, and there's not even a cell network.
: You're like, "This is essentially just a brick.
: I waited more than a year, and I can't do anything with it!"
: And once the battery dies, you're going to go
: to plug it in, and oh right, there's no freaking electricity!
: So, yeah, the world is different.
: Now, like railroads, there's plenty of nostalgia
: about the time before the internet,
: when people supposedly consumed less
: and talked to each other more
: because they weren't constantly on their phones.
: But if railroad reading is any indication,
: we've been looking for ways to use technology
: to avoid interacting with each other
: in real life for a long time.
: And we shouldn't forget that railroads made travel easier
: and opened up new vistas and made goods less expensive
: and brought people closer together.
: And they also helped create the idea of nostalgia.
: I mean, without industrial production,
: the nostalgia for pre-industrial methods of travel
: and manufacture couldn't exist.
: One of the best things about books like "The Railway Journey"
: is that they help us to draw parallels
: between the past and present and get us to focus
: on overlooked aspects of history, like what it meant
: for people to ride on trains for the first time.
: Now, our study of history shouldn't be focused too much
: on what we in the present can learn from the past.
: But trying to glimpse innovation and change
: as those who lived through it saw it?
: Well, I think that can be very useful
: to those of us living through a new technological revolution.
: Thanks for watching, I'll see you next week.
: Crash Course is filmed here
: in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis.
: It's possible because of all these nice people who make it
: and because of our Subbable subscribers.
: Subbable is a voluntary subscription service
: that allows you to support Crash Course directly
: so we can keep it free for everyone forever.
: Also, you can get like, I don't know, Mongols t-shirts,
: posters, DVDs if you want to support us.
: Regardless, thanks for watching,
: and as we say in my hometown,
: thanks for being awesome.
: Wait, no, we say don't forget to be awesome.
: and today, we are returning to a subject
: that could have a Crash Course series all of its own:
: the Industrial Revolution. - Mr. Green, Mr. Green!
: Are you going to do a whole series
: on the Industrial Revolution?
: Because that actually sounds really boring.
: - Yeah, Me from the Past, no, I-I'm a little bit busy.
: I got this movie that's about to film, so, yeah, no.
: But, uh, we are going to talk about, like, a specific
: and essential slice of the Industrial Revolution that also,
: like, pleases my four-year-old self a lot: railroads!
: (imitating railroad chugging) Choo-choo!
: We're going to talk about a small book
: by Wolfgang Schivelbusch called "The Railway Journey."
: So, in this Crash Course World History series,
: we're talking a lot about a lot of different history books
: so that we can approach subjects from a variety of angles.
: We want to introduce you to how exciting history can be
: and also how unsettled it is,
: how many arguments there still are.
: So to be clear I'm not saying
: I agree with everything in this book.
: It's one interpretation of a series of events.
: But it contains a ton of interesting ideas,
: and it's one of those books
: that makes you think differently about the world.
: And it's vitally important that
: we think about the role technology plays in our lives,
: including the technology of railroads.
: (music playing)
: (horse whinnying)
: So, railroads were these big, loud machines
: that people hadn't seen before,
: which makes them a pretty good metaphor for industrialization.
: Also, since not everyone worked in factories,
: railways were one of the few places
: that both middle- and upper-class people
: came face-to-face with industrial machinery.
: You know, if you were a factory worker,
: that stuff was around you all day every day,
: slowly killing your soul, but if you were, say,
: a mortgage broker, your work life hadn't changed.
: It's not like you had a computer.
: But the presence of railroads reminded you
: that you were in a different world
: from that of your parents or grandparents.
: It wasn't just locomotion, though;
: the railway itself changed the idea of an industrial machine
: to include its surrounding infrastructure, right?
: You needed rails and these huge engines.
: You needed timetables and organization.
: That encompassed everything that industrialization was about.
: And since railways changed the lives
: of middle- and upper-class people,
: who tend to write a lot, we know a lot about them.
: And the change was definitely seen as radical.
: For instance, the phrase "annihilation of time and space"
: was a pretty popular one when talking about railways.
: This wasn't just a fancy way of talking about
: how railways sped up travel, but also the way that the railroad
: destroyed traditional relationships with nature.
: I mean, sometimes nature was literally annihilated,
: as when tunnels were cut through hills,
: and depressions were graded
: to make the railroad as straight as possible,
: as if drawn with a ruler.
: But railroads also shaped space and time
: in a manner totally unprecedented in human history
: by, for instance, speeding up travel times,
: which shrunk the world.
: And then they expanded space
: by creating suburbs and new towns.
: In a positive development for 99% of the population,
: railroads changed space too, by opening up
: previously inaccessible, like, vacation spots of the wealthy.
: Then the wealthy migrated further away
: to places only accessible by air travel,
: like, I don't know, Ibiza, but now Ibiza's full of Euro-trash
: because of inexpensive airlines.
: Where will the one percent vacation?!
: Poor rich people, they had to go the Hamptons,
: which aren't even that nice, they're just really expensive.
: And there's the fact that
: railroads literally changed time--
: or at least created the standardization of time.
: Like before railroads,
: time in London was four minutes ahead of Reading
: and 14 minutes ahead of time in Bridgewater.
: Then in 1847, the Railway Clearing House,
: an organization established to regulate rail travel,
: established Greenwich Mean Time as the standard time
: on all rail lines, and in 1880
: it became the general standard time in England.
: So, to be clear, time as you know it is about as old
: as the oldest living person in the world.
: But the most obvious way that railroads changed things
: was travel.
: Until railroads, all travel was powered by muscles,
: either animal or human.
: So, we had a sense of distance as defined by fatigue.
: Like, when your horse died, you had gone a long way.
: Or like your horse, like, sprained a leg going down a hill
: and you had to shoot it.
: Point being for 250,000 years,
: all power was muscle power.
: And unless you could, like, ride a cheetah,
: you weren't going to go faster than about 20 mph.
: So, babies could go really fast,
: because they can ride cheetahs,
: but adults, there's no way, cheetahs weigh, like, 20 pounds.
: As Thomas de Quincy put it,
: "When we are traveling by stage-coach
: "at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour,
: "we can understand the nature of the force
: "which sets the vehicle in motion...
: "and in the course of a day's journey we can appreciate
: "the enormous succession of efforts required
: to transport a loaded vehicle from London to a distant town."
: Although to be fair, De Quincy's ideas about enormous effort
: may have been a bit skewed
: as he also wrote "Confessions of an Opium-Eater."
: Anyway, people were so comfortable with horses
: that some even argued that horsepower
: was superior to mechanical locomotion
: because horses relied more
: on renewable and easily obtained fuel.
: By the way, as you may see in comments,
: there is still a debate about whether horsepower
: or railroads are more carbon efficient.
: Anyway, the romantics at the time saw railroad travel
: as a "Loss of communicative relationship
: between man and nature."
: And some also saw the old technology horses
: as having, like, more soul.
: Mechanical travel was generally seen as a definite economic win,
: since it rendered all transportation calculable,
: and economists love to calculate.
: Railroads also changed the way that we looked at the world.
: Like, literally through a window with nature being this blur.
: And you can argue that, like, watching the world go by
: through a static window kind of prepared people
: for motion pictures and television,
: where we stare at a screen that doesn't move
: and watch a world that does.
: Now, these noisy, coal-powered trains
: affected all the senses but especially vision.
: As Victor Hugo described it in 1837,
: "The flowers by the side of the road
: "are no longer flowers but fleck,
: "or rather streaks of red and white;
: there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak."
: So, many people experienced this landscape as a monotonous blur,
: but for others it was something new and exciting.
: For Benjamin Gastineau,
: the constantly changing view was thrilling.
: "In quick succession it presents the astonished traveler
: "with happy scenes, sad scenes,
: "burlesque interludes, brilliant fireworks,
: all visions that disappear as soon as they are seen."
: That sounds like a great movie.
: All I see when I look out the train window
: is the infinite abyss of meaninglessness,
: and then I plug my phone and open Floppy Bird,
: and everything's okay again.
: And railroad travel also changed human behavior.
: Okay, let's go to the Thought Bubble.
: Since looking at the landscape
: was no longer the same experience,
: and according to the medical journal "The Lancet,"
: "The rapidity and variety of the impressions
: necessarily fatigue both the eye and the brain,"
: many people turned to reading books on railroads.
: For starters, reading was a way for upper-class passengers
: to avoid having to talk with each other.
: European first- and second-class railcars were designed
: to mimic stagecoaches, with passengers facing each other.
: Now, in pre-railroad travel, you knew you were going to be stuck
: with whoever was in your stagecoach,
: so it was important to try to be nice
: and strike up a conversation.
: But the short duration of railroad journeys
: discouraged the formation of rapport between travelers,
: changing our habits and turning reading on the train
: into a necessity.
: Rail travel also brought new fears,
: like, when traveling at the speed of a cannonball,
: it was hard to overcome one's terror of a possible derailment.
: As Thomas Creevey put it, "It is really flying,
: and it is impossible to divest yourself of the notion
: of instant death to all upon the least accident happening."
: So that's why I'm afraid of flying.
: And to be fair, railway accidents were common enough
: that physicians began to document cases of railway spine,
: a condition suffered by people
: who'd come through railway accidents
: with complaints of pain but few or no signs of physical injury.
: By the end of the 1880s, however,
: railway spine gave way as a diagnosis to traumatic neurosis,
: reflecting new ideas in psychology.
: Eventually, pathological explanations
: for what looks like a lot like nervous shock slipped away
: and only the psychological ones were left.
: Thanks, Thought Bubble.
: So new technologies often bring new anxieties,
: because change is terrifying.
: Remember how the internet was going to bring
: an end to reading books?
: Remember how "e-learning"
: was going to replace classrooms,
: and there were going to be all of these "e-teachers"
: who would replace your real teachers?
: But yeah, no, it turns out that
: real-life teachers are pretty great.
: Like Heinrich Heine wrote that railroads produced
: "tremendous foreboding such as we always feel
: "when there comes an enormous, an unheard-of event
: whose consequences are imponderable and incalculable."
: Fortunately, our new, industrial worldview
: associated change with progress.
: Like, this notion that humans move forward,
: that children will have a better life
: than their parents did-- that's new.
: That is... oh, it's time for the Open Letter.
: But first, let's see what's in the globe today.
: Oh no, it's change.
: (whispers): I hate change.
: An open letter to progress.
: One of the reasons I think we're afraid of change
: is that change doesn't really mean progress.
: For the vast majority of human history,
: the lives of children could be much worse
: than the lives of their parents.
: It depended on disease and weather and kings.
: Mostly on disease and weather.
: There was no idea that moving forward
: also meant moving up.
: And I would argue that certainly
: innovation has given us much to be grateful for,
: but there's something to a reluctance to change.
: I love you, progress,
: and you have given me much to be grateful for.
: But a gentle reminder: change doesn't always mean progress.
: Best wishes, John Green.
: So as Schivelbusch puts it,
: "New modes of behavior and perception
: "enabled the traveler to lose the fear
: "that he formerly felt toward the new conveyance.
: "The sinister aspect of the machinery
: "that first was so evident and frightening
: "gradually disappeared, and with this disappearance,
: "fear waned and was replaced by a feeling of security
: based on familiarity."
: Huh, that sounds precisely like my relationship
: with a phone that always knows where I am.
: New technologies often change the way people live
: and perceive the world.
: Like, one example would be the printing press.
: It made knowledge and information available
: as never before, but it only really affected
: a small segment of the population-- at least initially.
: Industrialization was different
: in that it had a profound effect
: on large numbers of people in a very short time.
: And since the dawn of industrialization,
: the pace of this change and the enormity of its impact
: has only increased like, well, like a speeding train, I guess.
: Except it's like a train that gets faster and faster
: until it reaches the speed of light.
: Oh my gosh, what a wonderful idea.
: Somebody call Elon Musk.
: So for most of us, the internet
: is a technology very much like the railroad.
: Like the railroad, the internet in its earliest stages
: was both frightening to detractors
: and exhilarating to its boosters.
: And like the railroads, it has shrunk the world,
: enabling me to communicate with you
: via, you know, the tubes...
: I don't really know how the internet works.
: And it's also changed our perception of time.
: Think about how much sooner you expect a response to an email
: or a text message versus a letter or even a phone call.
: Think about the fact that you can order a phone from China
: and have it arrive at your door in a week,
: and that still feels like kind of a long time.
: In the age of the railroads, to get a phone--
: which didn't exist-- from China to Indianapolis
: would have taken months.
: To get that same nonexistent phone from China to Indianapolis
: in 1700 would have taken more than a year.
: And then you turn it on, and there's not even a cell network.
: You're like, "This is essentially just a brick.
: I waited more than a year, and I can't do anything with it!"
: And once the battery dies, you're going to go
: to plug it in, and oh right, there's no freaking electricity!
: So, yeah, the world is different.
: Now, like railroads, there's plenty of nostalgia
: about the time before the internet,
: when people supposedly consumed less
: and talked to each other more
: because they weren't constantly on their phones.
: But if railroad reading is any indication,
: we've been looking for ways to use technology
: to avoid interacting with each other
: in real life for a long time.
: And we shouldn't forget that railroads made travel easier
: and opened up new vistas and made goods less expensive
: and brought people closer together.
: And they also helped create the idea of nostalgia.
: I mean, without industrial production,
: the nostalgia for pre-industrial methods of travel
: and manufacture couldn't exist.
: One of the best things about books like "The Railway Journey"
: is that they help us to draw parallels
: between the past and present and get us to focus
: on overlooked aspects of history, like what it meant
: for people to ride on trains for the first time.
: Now, our study of history shouldn't be focused too much
: on what we in the present can learn from the past.
: But trying to glimpse innovation and change
: as those who lived through it saw it?
: Well, I think that can be very useful
: to those of us living through a new technological revolution.
: Thanks for watching, I'll see you next week.
: Crash Course is filmed here
: in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis.
: It's possible because of all these nice people who make it
: and because of our Subbable subscribers.
: Subbable is a voluntary subscription service
: that allows you to support Crash Course directly
: so we can keep it free for everyone forever.
: Also, you can get like, I don't know, Mongols t-shirts,
: posters, DVDs if you want to support us.
: Regardless, thanks for watching,
: and as we say in my hometown,
: thanks for being awesome.
: Wait, no, we say don't forget to be awesome.