Grant Receives R&LHS Research Fellowship

Akron Railroad Club member H. Roger Grant has been awarded a $2,500 research fellowship by the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society.

Grant, a history professor at Clemson University, will use his award to research a book-length study of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad.

The project will explore the long, complicated history of the rail line made famous by the song Rock Island Line by Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter.

Many contemporary railroad enthusiasts know the Rock Island as a bankrupt carrier that was among the few railroads not to join Amtrak in 1971. The Rock operated for nearly 130 before being liquidated.

Grant came to Clemson in 1996 from the University of Akron, where he had been teaching history since 1970. In 2006, Grant was awarded the Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professorship by Clemson.

Specializing in U.S. history, especially transportation history and American railroads, Grant has written or edited 33 academic books. His latest book, John W. Barriger III: Railroad Legend, will be published in Spring 2018 by Indiana University Press.

Also awarded a fellowship by R&LHS was Scott E. Randolph of Redlands, California.

Randolph graduated from Rutgers University with a B.A. in History and went on to receive his master’s from the University of Akron, and a Ph.D. from Purdue University.

He has taught at Purdue, Wyoming, and Armstrong Atlantic State Universities and in 2011 joined the faculty of the University of Redlands.

His areas of research include the culture of capitalism, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and transportation history with an emphasis on railways.

He is curator and associate archivist for the Erie Lackawanna Historical Society and editor for the Society for the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

He will use his R&LHS grant to study a mostly forgotten, yet essential example of Progressive-era regulatory law, the 1913 Federal Valuation Act.

It was intended to establish a rational, scientific base-line for railroad rates. The law provided for a physical valuation of the assets of every common carrier railroad in the country.

Neither railroads nor their regulators possessed a systematic understanding of the cost of providing transportation and thus pricing and its regulation were effected largely ad hoc.

In part because of its seemingly irrational basis, rate-making was central to the “Railroad Problem” that permeated political discourse into the 1930s.

Tags: Akron Railroad Club, Clemson University, H. Roger Grant, R&LHS research fellowships, Railway & Locomotive Historical Society, Scott E. Randolph, University of Akron