Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This is 50 Weeks that shaped America, Week 20. We are looking at some of the stories that most shaped

this country's history and helped bring us to this moment, the 250th birthday of this country. And late last year, I will tell you listeners, when we were

starting to map out stories for this year-long series, we listed a bunch of topics that we knew

we really wanted to get to that felt like they got to some of the big ideas and the key themes

and the important eras of the last 250 years. And I remember at one point,

just typing into the Google Doc, two words, golden spike. Because it is definitely a sticky

phrase and it's one of those classic little sidebars in your high school history book. Can you

picture it now? It's maybe accompanied by the photo of a bunch of guys in suits standing in front

of two trains, shaking hands as the final golden spike is driven into the ground to connect to

railroad systems. One of those systems was pushing east across the frontier, another one

sneaking its way west from the Pacific Ocean, and all of a sudden, with that final spike driven

into the ground, the United States had a transcontinental railroad.

So, Golden Spike, it's a very cool phrase, it's a cool object, and as it happens, a story

that really does help explain how we arrived at this moment.

We arrived by train.

I know I get it.

No, how we arrived in general at this moment. The expansion of train. I know I get it. No, how we arrived in general at this moment.

The expansion of the railroad involves enormous wealth, staggering corruption, modern

capitalism propped up by government largesse, exploited labor, the promise of riches, new immigrant

groups. This is the story of America, folks. That also mentioned that there's just an incredible

amount of corruption, staggering corruption. Just so much corruption. So much corruption. So we will get to that,

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