Lina Khan served as chair of the Federal Trade Commission from June 2021 to January 2025. She teaches and writes about antitrust law, infrastructure industries law, the antimonopoly tradition, and law and political economy. She captures the complicated story of America’s first transcontinental railroad.
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Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all images used in this video are in the public domain.
Map of the route of the First Transcontinental Railroad. 2006. Cave cattum. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
I believe Ms. Khan missed one of the most important events occurring during the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. It is well known that the Chinese workers were much harder workers than the white Americans. In fact, so much so, that the whites were very resentful of the Chinese and eventually were able to drive the Chinese from their homes, killing hundreds of Chinese families which resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibiting Chinese from immigrating to the United States in 1882. Truly a black eye in American history.