Henry Blood

Railroads and the Transformation of State and Society in the Habsburg Empire.

In the 1830s and 1840s, engineers from the Habsburg Empire, such as Matthias von Schönerer, Franz Anton von Gerstner, and Karl Ghega all travelled to the United States of America to learn about the development of railroads in America. Why did Austrians travel so far, and so consistently across the Atlantic when according to our traditional understanding of railway history, Great Britain was the heart of railway engineering? The Botstiber Research Grant will help answer this question and will fund the research required for a chapter of my doctoral dissertation at New York University in which I explore the transfer of railroad technology between the United States of America
and the Habsburg Empire.