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Wedding of the Waters - The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (Paperback, New edition)
Loot Price: R459
Discovery Miles 4 590
You Save: R90
(16%)
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Wedding of the Waters - The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (Paperback, New edition)
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List price R549
Loot Price R459
Discovery Miles 4 590
You Save R90 (16%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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The history of the Erie Canal is a riveting story of American
ingenuity. A great project that Thomas Jefferson judged to be
"little short of madness," and that others compared with going to
the moon, soon turned into one of the most successful and
influential public investments in American history. In Wedding of
the Waters, best-selling author Peter L. Bernstein recounts the
canal's creation within the larger tableau of a youthful America in
the first quarter-century of the 1800s. Leaders of the fledgling
nation had quickly recognized that the Appalachian mountain range
was a formidable obstacle to uniting the Atlantic states with the
vast lands of the west. A pathway for commerce as well as travel
was critical to the security and expansion of the Revolution's
unprecedented achievement. Gripped by the same fever that had
driven explorers such as Hudson and Champlain, a motley assortment
of politicians, surveyors, and would-be engineers set out to build
a complex structure of a type few of them had ever actually seen,
let alone built or operated: a manmade waterway cut through the
mountains to traverse the 363 miles between Lake Erie and the
Hudson River. By linking the seas to the interior and the interior
to the seas, these pioneers ultimately connected the Atlantic Ocean
to the Mississippi River. Bernstein examines the social
ramifications, political squabbles, and economic risks and returns
of this mammoth project. He goes on to demonstrate how the canal's
creation helped bind the western settlers in the new lands to their
fellow Americans in the original colonies, knitted the sinews of
the American industrial revolution, and even influenced profound
economic change in Europe. Featuring a rich cast of characters that
includes political visionaries like George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, and Martin van Buren; the canal's most powerful
champions, Governor DeWitt Clinton and Gouverneur Morris; and a
huge platoon of Irish and American diggers, Wedding of the Waters
reveals that the twenty-first-century themes of urbanization,
economic growth, and globalization can all be traced to the first
great macroengineering venture of American history.
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