Stories of America — Season 1, Episode 26: The Transcontinental Railroad
Kids • 15 min • 1 season, 32 episodes
Episode synopsis
This episode introduces children to the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, one of the most ambitious projects in America’s early history. Through simple narration and reenactments, the program explains how two railroad companies worked from opposite sides of the country, laying track across mountains, plains, and deserts until they finally met at Promontory Summit in 1869. The episode highlights the hard work of the laborers—many of them immigrants—the challenges they faced, and the excitement of connecting the nation from coast to coast. Designed for classroom learning, it shows how the railroad transformed travel, trade, and everyday life in the United States.
About Stories of America
The interconnectedness of all things is a fundamental part of reading motivation projects. Although GPN's Reading Rainbow claims to have invented that idea, Stories of America with host Ann McGregor got there first. It was 1976, America's bicentennial year, and WVIZ-TV of Cleveland wanted something more out of a series aimed at delivering American history, They decided to combine history with reading. The result was Stories of America. Hosting was the familiar face of Ann McGregor, who had enlivened Picture Book Park and Tilson's Bookshop some two years earlier. Stories of America resembled more of a story reading than a history lesson, but it also introduced other elements that became standard Reading Rainbow procedure. There were occasional film sequences, dramatizations, and even an animation. All told, the 32-part Stories of America series ran some 14 years on WVIZ-TV. The station brought the shows back in 1998, and it would be the only WVIZ instructional telev