Abstract
In Over the Alleghenies, Robert Kapsch has produced a detailed narrative history of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s internal improvement program between 1826 and 1858. During these years, Pennsylvania struggled to construct, maintain, and operate a technologically sophisticated but f nancially precarious system of canals, railroads, and improved river navigation that reached into all corners of the state. The impetus for the system came from Pennsylvania boosters’ desires to compete with New York’s Erie Canal for the trade of the Great Lakes and Ohio River valley in the 1820s, but the political exigencies of constructing the Main Line between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh required the simultaneous construction of branch lines along the Susquehanna, the Delaware, and other smaller streams. The system was ultimately unsuccessful in fulflling its original mission because it was too technically, fnancially, and politically precarious to beat the Erie at its own game. But, as Kapsch points out, the Pennsylvania system pioneered a number of important technologies, particularly in railroad construction and operation, and many of its branches played locally important economic roles. The history of such a system represents an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century Pennsylvania.