Poems rely on research from the following sources:

  • Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like it in the Word: The Men Who built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869.
  • Mary Frances Armstrong, On Habits and Manners.
  • David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad.
  • Samuel Bowles, Across the Continent.
  • Sir Richard Francis Burton, The City of the Saints.
  • Sue Fawn Chung and Priscilla Wegars, eds, Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors.
  • Jeanne Fogle Cook, Experiences of orphan train riders: Implications for child welfare policy, dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1994.
  • Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonialism.
  • Sarah Del Seronde, Metal Road: A Day in the Life of a Navajo Railroader.
  • Hilary A. Hallett, Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood.
  • Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness.
  • Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in 19th Century America,” Signs, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1979, pp. 3-29.
  • Walter R. Houghton and others, The American Etiquette and Rules of Politeness.
  • Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad.
  • Dennis Kearney, Speeches of Dennis Kearney, Labor Champion, New York: Jesse Haney & Co
  • Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey.
  • Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910-1940.
  • Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States.
  • Patricia Ann Pawlak, The Diary of Mary McKeon, an Irish American Domestic Servant in Nineteenth Century America, Duke University MA thesis, August 2016.
  • Amy G. Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, The Railroads and the Rise of Public Domesticity.
  • Michael Rutter, Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West.
  • Wong Sam and assistants, An English-Chinese Phrase Book, Jerry & Co, 1875.
  • Stephanie J. Shaw, What A Woman Ought to Be and Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era.
  • T.L. Stedman and K.P. Lee. A Chinese and English Phrase Book in the Canton Dialect, or Dialogues on Ordinary Life and Familiar Subjects, 1888.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods.
  • Anthony Trollope, North America.
  • Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History.
  • Jay Youngdahl, Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty: Navajo, Hózhú, and Track Work.
  • Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.
  • Glenn Willumson, Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad.

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