Many Voices

“The Nation’s First Super­high­way” exist­ed before the spread of cars … or even rail­roads! This immer­sive pho­to book fer­ries read­ers through the past and present of the Erie Canal, from impos­si­ble idea to ground­break­ing reality.

In the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, it’s hard to imag­ine a canal as cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy. Yet even to the most sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-mind­ed, the Erie Canal once seemed an unachiev­able dream. Thomas Jef­fer­son him­self called it “noth­ing short of mad­ness;” one crit­ic felt sure it was impos­si­ble as “build­ing a canal to the moon.” Yet with eight years and near­ly $185 mil­lion dol­lars in today’s cur­ren­cy, the Erie Canal opened in 1825 to cel­e­bra­to­ry can­non fire: an inno­vat­ing — and endur­ing — mar­vel of engineering.

But as the Canal shaped the flow of Amer­i­can his­to­ry, the sociopo­lit­i­cal impact reached much fur­ther than its shores. A large­ly untold tale of cre­ativ­i­ty and cow­ardice, sac­ri­fice and greed, hero­ism and prej­u­dice, the Erie Canal’s sto­ry is as com­plex and com­pelling as that of Amer­i­ca itself.

Author Lau­rie Lawlor cap­tures the land­mark achieve­ments of the Erie Canal while div­ing deep into cor­po­rate greed, envi­ron­men­tal dev­as­ta­tion, poor work­ing con­di­tions, and its impact on the Hau­denosaunee peo­ple. Pair­ing rich back mat­ter (includ­ing maps, source notes, an index, bib­li­og­ra­phy, glos­sary, and time­line) with atten­tion grab­bing pho­tographs, accom­plished STEAM sto­ry­teller Lau­rie Lawlor con­nects the Erie Canal’s past and present to plumb the depths of unex­plored Amer­i­can history.