Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 Book

Welke makes a good case for the ways in which modern bodily vulnerability profoundly altered Americans' sense of self in relation to corporations and government. As she does so, she highlights the irony that the government's role in the preservation of "bodily integrity" - the right of an individual to keep his or her body free from harm - ironically limited certain American bodily freedoms (including the right to endanger one's body). That said, Welke's project does depend upon the reader's acceptance of the book's critical premises, most particularly the centrality of travel to Americans' conception of liberty. While the assertion that travel was critical to individual autonomy is logical enough, the place of movement within cultural understandings of freedom would have been an interesting, and formative, line of inquiry.