Niagara Falls was a lightning rod for nineteenth-century enthusiasms. Although travelers came to the falls to experience a place they considered outside the world of their ordinary lives, they brought with them their contemporary concerns. Many tourists were obsessed with the mysteries of death, others with scientific or religious speculation. The way they imagined Niagara Falls found expression in a torrent of writings and images that took a variety of forms.Patrick McGreevy begins with the question, What can these visions of Niagara tell us about the place itself? The landscape surrounding the falls contains not only parks and religious shrines but also circuses, horror museums, and factories. People travel to Niagara not only to experience nature but also to celebrate marriages or commit suicide.One way to make sense of these bizarre "human accumulations," as H. G. Wells called them, is to take seriously the Niagaras people have imagined. This book focuses on four interlocking themes that recur time and again in descriptions of the falls: Niagara as a thing imagined from afar, as a metaphor for death, as an embodiment of nature, and as a focus of future events. Using the skills of a cultural geographer, McGreevy discovers some surprising connections between the Niagara people have imagined and the one they made, between its natural grandeur and its industrial exploitation, between Frederick Law Olmsted's Reservation and the Love Canal.

Imagining Niagara: The Meaning and Making of Niagara Falls

History

McGreevy, Patrick

Americas

University of Massachusetts Press

The story of the Erie Canal’s completion and its place in the larger narrative of American modernity and progress. The stunning achievement of the Erie Canal’s completion is brought to life in this riveting story. In the spring of 1821, thousands of workers descended on the isolated village of Lockport, New York, twenty miles east of Niagara Falls. Their goal was to dig and blast a waterway through the so-called Mountain Ridge, the escarpment over which the Niagara River flows, and to divert some of that river’s flow eastward, thus completing the Erie Canal. This final obstacle would take five years to overcome, and the Lockport Locks, the ingenious device that carried boats to the top of the ridge, would come to be seen as an icon of American achievement―like the Erie Canal itself, a stairway to empire. Taking advantage of a rich trove of construction records, travelers’ writings, and visual material, Stairway to Empire examines the triumphs and tensions of this iconic American accomplishment and its place in the larger narrative of American modernity and progress. In the decades that followed its completion, the canal rearranged political and economic power on the continent, forming new connections and rupturing old ones, and creating winners and losers in the process. Piercing the barrier of the Appalachian Mountains, the Erie Canal established New York City as the American metropolis, the North’s economic ascendance over the South, and the United States as the dominant power in North America. Yet even as it explores these local and continental implications and the divergent meanings that have been attributed to them, Stairway to Empire also attends to the silences and shadows of a particular event (cutting through the Mountain Ridge), a particular place (Lockport), and the stories we have constructed to try to understand them.

Stairway to Empire: Lockport, The Erie Canal, and The Shaping of America

Excelsior Editions

The story of the Erie Canal’s completion and its place in the larger narrative of American modernity and progress.

Stairway to Empire: Lockport, the Erie Canal, and the Shaping of America (Excelsior Editions)

State University of New York Press

The surprising connections between the Niagara people have imagined and the one they made

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McGreevy, Patrick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McGreevy, Patrick

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McGreevy, Patrick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Imagining Niagara: The Meaning and Making of Niagara Falls

Stairway to Empire: Lockport, The Erie Canal, and The Shaping of America

Stairway to Empire: Lockport, the Erie Canal, and the Shaping of America (Excelsior Editions)

Imagining Niagara: The Meaning and Making of Niagara Falls