[ applause ] tonight on american history tv you can watch this program and more during our special look at the american west and cowboy culture. it starts at 8:00 p.m. eastern right over on cspan3. american history tv is in prime-time all week every week for the rest of the year. you're watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming every weekend on cspan3. follow us on twitter at cspan history for information on our schedule. and to keep up with the latest history news. our cspan cities tour takes american history on the road to feature history of cities across america. here's a recent program. in the years before the

arrival of the transcontinental railroad, tacoma was not dissimilar from other areas around puget sound. coming over the oregon trail and then by sea, small little villages really of americans and europeans had arrived, mostly along the shoreline. and that was because primary purpose here for people that were settling was cutting timber and milling timber that was then sent down to san francisco. so that prompted a lot of entrepreneurs and small investors and adventer u -- adv

to come and build cities. all were small, smallish communities of 50 to a few hundred people really prior to the coming of the transcontinental. but at the conclusion of the civil war and the announcement really that the railroad was coming, every community, you know, hoped that they would be the terminal city, that they would be chosen for the railroad. so it came down to really being between seattle, tacoma and olympia. and so by 1873, by early in 1873, the transcontinental obviously was being built in two directions. it wasn't just having one rail

head. the big decision was congress in the charter for the railroad had dictated that the section from the columbia river to puget sound needed to be completed and the railroad company needed to bring steam engines to saltwater by december of 1873. in july of that year, the tracks had been laid from the columbia about halfway to where tonino is today on i-5. then it was in july of that year, all the time the railroad had been entertaining offers from the various communities, cash, land, port facilities, whatever a community, a city could put together to kind of lure the railroad there. in january -- in july of 1873, july 14th, the final decision between seattle and tacoma was

made and tacoma was selected. and the terminal city, the choice for the conclusion of the line then was set up not only to be an arrival point for goods and travelers, but also for the arrival of the telegraph which meant news and banking and communications. so the course of the transcontinental railroad at the end of the 19th century was a big deal for the far west. the reason tacoma was picked, there was a multitude of reasons, but the primary reasons are first of all, it's an absolutely perfect harbor, especially for sailing vessels. but even today it's an ideal harbor. deep water harbor. tight flats and lots of area for wharves. nearby solid bedrock ground

which would carry the weight of freight and railroad so you could bring the train right up to the dock and be able to load goods off and on the ship. that was part of it. frankly another reason was that the railroad was built on land grants, the federal government basically divided the whole route into square mile blocks and surveyed it and the railroad got like a checker board got every other parcel as payment for building the railroad. in seattle most of seattle had already been stake claimed and was owned by the residents of seattle. in tacoma, much smaller population, much more vacant ground. the railroad came here because they could literally own the city and indeed they did. when they arrived here, the railroad, and that's part of tacoma's first half of its life.

the railroad came in. they set up the land company and then they began to profit off of the sale of land within the city. so it went from forest land that was practically valueless once the trees were cut to suddenly urban real estate that they could profit off of. so they brought wealth with them and then they were able to turn around and profit from it. we see elements of that today, too, because not only did the railroad own the land and their by own the terms by which they would sell the land to somebody that wanted to build a building or whatever, a house, but they, in the days before building codes and zoning, they were able to enforce their own ideas about how they wanted the city to look. you very much sense that today here on the campus. these sturdy brick warehouses were all built under the guidelines that were imposed by

the railroad. so the builders of the warehouses would meet the terms, the cash terms to buy the land from the railroad in the first place, but the railroad then dictated the design, the construction method of the buildings themselves. so all these warehouses, these sturdy fireproof warehouses are all pretty much the idea, the force building standards the railroad had. by the 1930s and then into the '40s the neighborhood gone to kind of recede a little bit as the automobile took over and the passenger traffic by rail faded away. warehouses still remained in operation but as the port modernized, a lot of the big grocery warehousers and hardware, all of the goods that came and went, moved out into the industrial port area.

and the prairie line became almost forgotten in a way. it was still a utility. it was still used. but it wasn't appreciated or understood for the story that went with it. and really after the second world war it even passenger service largely stopped on the prairie line in 1955 or thereabouts, the last passenger service stopped traveling on the prairiethereabouts, the last pa service stopped traveling on the prairie line. the city itself began to go through a revival. because of the sturdy infrastructure, the environment of tacoma, the recovery of the city largely happened around the reuse of the historic buildings that were already here. it was during that period that people began to realize hey, wait a minute, the origin of the

city is still intact. it's still here and still functioning. so in the 1990s and then into the current century after 2000 the campus decided, the university of washington launched the campus here. they had been downtown. they moved to the warehouse district and began buying up all the old empty warehouses and building a modern day campus. and a few years ago now, about 2010 with the expansion of the library, for the first time, people began to talk about actually intruding on the 80-foot right-of-way of the prairie line. there was conversation in building out the campus and the needs that they would start to encroach. and then somebody remembered that the 80-foot right-of-way is

where everything started. and the university made a very kind of courageous decision to keep the 80-foot right-of-way as open space. to keep the loading docks as covered pedestrian ways and to keep as much as they could of the language of the railroad still intact. today the prairie line as we see it, although it's been hard skapska skahardscape and modernized, it's now the sort of linear central open space of thehardscaped and mode now the sort of linear central open space of the campus. for people coming here they don't just enjoy a modern campus. they get a look at not just the narrative of tacoma, but a big chapter in american history. you can watch this and other programs on the history of

communities across the country at cspan.org/citiestour. this is american history tv only on cspan3. good weekend on american history tv on cspan3. saturday at 8:00 p.m. eastern on lectures in history, american university professor aaron bell talks about privacy laws and federal surveillance of civil rights leaders. >> he was the head of the co-intel operations william sullivan shortly after the march on washington and martin luther king jr.'s famous i have a dream speech. me must mark king as the most dangerous negro in the future of this nation from the standpoint of communism, the negro and national security. former members of congress reflect on lessons learned. >> we learned the limits of military pour during the vietnam

war. we learned that as a society, as a culture that you can't kill an idea with a bullet. >> american history tv, this weekend only on cspan3. sunday on cspan's q&a, heritage foundation distinguished fellow lee edwards chronicles his 60 year involvement in the conservative movement. >> i met joe mccarthy through my father who was something of a confidant to him. he was a fellow well met. he liked to party. he liked a drink or two. and as long as you didn't talk about communism, you couldn't ask for a more fun guy to be with. but he was very serious about that. he was also someone who did not take advice very well. and he subsequently said things and even did things that hurt the cause of any communism for