Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The Erie Canal has been fabled in story and song, remember that ditty from grade school about the "low bridge, everybody down/low bridge for we're coming to a town." It proved to be one of the earliest and most effective public works projects in the early American republic. It linked New York City to the upper Midwest, and it secured economic supremacy for the city known to all of us now as the "Big Apple." Indeed, before the opening of the Erie Canal, Philadelphia was the dominant city in the United States. In no small manner, the canal changed the nature of the American nation.
"Bond of Union" is a very fine account of the building of the canal, as well as its meaning in American history. The author, a well-known journalist in New York who has written about water and its supply to the city, has a fine sense of drama and emphasizes the unique cast of characters in this story to advantage. This includes the ever intriguing Thomas Jefferson, New York governor DeWitt Clinton, surveyor John Randel, and Benjamin Wright, the "Father of American Civil Engineering." Politicians come into play, jockeying to ensure that the canal went through their constituents' towns and terminated where they stood the most to gain. A major fight took place over the western terminus, for example, and Black Rock was an early possibility. Have you never heard of Black Rock? If not, that's not surprising because the town eventually chosen, Buffalo, went on to grow into one of the largest cities in the nation while Black Rock was passed by.
Gerard Koeppel's account of the Erie Canal is first of all a very fine narrative, enjoyable and quite useful. It is not, a rigorous scholarly work that seeks to do anything more than tell a very entertaining and enlightening story. As a story it is superb. As an analytical work of history it has less value.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire

Get 3% OFF

Click here for more information about Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire