The Mighty Niagra: One River, Two Frontiers

摘要

Few rivers receive the adjective mighty. The Mississippi often freights the modifier along with barge traffic and seasonal devastation. Schoolchildren hearing the word attached to the Niagara almost certainly think of falls, then of hydroelectricity. As rivers go, the Niagara is not well known as a highway. But it is kinetic energy itself. John Jackson focuses first on the deep past of the river and its region, but always through the prism of modernity. His book probes not only the physical geography of the region divided by the river but also its cultural pasts. From precontact Native American eras onward, the Niagara has been a boundary, and Jackson painstakingly traces the struggle of Britain and France, and then the new United States, for mastery over the river, its region, and, above all, its vast hinterland. Illustrated with acutely rendered, detailed maps that advance its arguments, the book positions its reader in regional time and space and focuses on the technological change peculiar to the Niagara country.