Registration Open for our Winter Gathering; This Weekend: James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway
Registration Open for our Winter Gathering
Getting From Here to There: Connecting Trains, Transit, Bikes, Rolling and Walking in Communities of All Sizes: Greater Northwest Winter Gathering and Annual Meeting for AAWA, AORTA, AANW and the Rail Passengers Association NW Division
Saturday, December 9, 2023, 10 am PT
Centralia Depot or on Zoom
Details available at the GNWPRS website
Hosted by All Aboard Washington, The Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates, All Aboard Northwest, and the Northwest Region of the Rail Passengers Association.
Keynote Speaker: Peter Norton Ph. D, Associate Professor, University of Virginia
Dr. Peter Norton is associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia, where he teaches history of technology, social dimensions of engineering, research, and professional ethics. He is the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (MIT Press), and of Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving (Island Press, 2021). In 2018-19 Norton was a visiting faculty member at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. His article “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street,” published in Technology and Culture, won the Abbott Payson Usher Prize of the Society for the History of Technology. He has published work in transportation history and policy, traffic safety, and autonomous vehicles. He is a member of the University of Virginia’s Center for Transportation Studies. Norton is a winner of the Hartfield-Jefferson Scholars Teaching Prize and of the Trigon Engineering Society’s Hutchinson Award “for dedication and excellence in teaching.” He is a frequent speaker on the subject of sustainable and equitable urban mobility.
Register now at the AAWA website! Early bird rates expire November 17.
https://www.aawa.us/events/2023-winter-gathering/
This Weekend: James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway
Documentary Producer Stephen Sadis
Saturday, 14 October 2023, 1:00 pm PT
Zoom Meeting
Hosted by All Aboard Washington
Our speaker for October's Zoom meeting will be Stephen Sadis, Director/Editor, Great Northern Filmworks. He is the producer of a 4-part documentary series capturing the compelling story of James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway.
He was known as "The Empire Builder" and "The Devil's Curse." Streets, towns and counties were named in his honor along with a persistent and invasive weed. He was mythologized in novels and was the target of union battle cries. In households across America, James J. Hill was as well-known as any industrial leader of his day – yet today he is largely unknown.
When the railroad ushered in one of the most transformative eras in American history, James J. Hill emerged as its unrivaled leader. Building a transportation empire that stretched across North America and to the Orient, he was a catalyst for the agriculture, timber and mining industries of the West and settled tens of thousands of immigrants along his lines.
As the pendulum swung from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era, Hill was a lightning rod for the most impactful issues of the day: immigration, settling the West, government regulations, market manipulation, trust-busting, Native American displacement, environmental stewardship as well as redefining our nation's political and financial role on the global stage.
Register now at https://www.aawa.us/events/aawa-general-meeting-october-2023/