Here and there on the Intertubes, you will find various right-wing commentators (John Derbyshire at NRO for one) saying that President Obama got his history wrong. That the United States didn't invent the car and that the Transcontinental Railroad didn't start until July of 1865, almost three months after the end of the Civil War.
Well, as tends to be the case with right-wing commentators, they are wrong.
ShawnGBR deals with the question of who invented the first real automobile in a great diary (spoiler - it was the US). I just want to touch briefly on the Transcontinental Railroad (TR).
The railroad was really the combination of two rail lines. One was begun by Union Pacific outside of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The other was started by Central Pacific in Sacramento, California. As we all know from our schooling, the two lines met at Promentory Summit, Utah in 1869.
Now, the Union Pacific side of things never really got off the ground until July of 1865. The controlling partner, Thomas Durant, manipulated the process in the early going to have extraneous track built on land he owned around Council Bluffs. It was only after the Civil War ended that the federal government was able to focus on the issue and get it cleaned up and moving west.
If is this all that actually happened in regards to the TR, then the right-wing bloviators would be right about President Obama flubbing the history. But that isn't all that happened, is it? What about those fellows in California?
Central Pacific's side of the TR was a much better run affair. Governor Stanford (yes, that Stanford) broke ground in Sacramento in early January in 1863. They had to push the rail through the Sierra Nevada range, a tough affair that cost a lot of lives. But they got it done and met the Union Pacific side in Utah in 1869.
Notice the date on that: January, 1863. That would be a little more than two years before the end of the Civil War. And since California was a state at the time and on the Union side...well, that would make President Obama correct and the Derbyshire Gang completely and utterly wrong.
But we shouldn't be too surprised by all this. President Obama has been making the right-wing look foolish for over a year on a variety of subjects. Why should it be any different when it comes to history?