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Fixing Niagara Falls
Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall
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Daniel Macfarlane
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2020
About this book
Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Falls has been heavily engineered to generate energy behind a flowing façade designed to appeal to tourists. Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the technological feats and cross-border politics that facilitated the transformation of one of the most important natural sites in North America. Daniel Macfarlane details how engineers, bureaucrats, and politicians conspired to manipulate the world’s most famous waterfall. Essentially, they turned this natural wonder into a tap: huge tunnels divert the waters of the Niagara River around the Falls, which ebb and flow according to the tourism calendar. To hide the visual impact of diverting the majority of the water, the United States and Canada cooperated to install massive control works while reshaping and shrinking the Horseshoe Falls. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on how the Niagara landscape ultimately embodies both the power of technology and the power of nature.
Author / Editor information
Daniel Macfarlane is an associate professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. He is also a senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, University of Toronto, and president of the International Water History Association. He is the author of Negotiating a River: Canada, the US, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and also co-edited Border Flows: A Century of the Canadian–American Water Relationship with Lynne Heasley, and The First Century of the International Joint Commission with Murray Clamen.
Reviews
With this carefully researched study, we find in Niagara Falls a locus of past concerns that reverberate today: the realities of appropriation, the hubristic underbelly of "green" energy, the politics of energy transitions and exports, the power struggles between provincial, state, and federal governments.
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"… Macfarlane’s great contribution is to provide a comprehensive account of the creation of the engineering complex at Niagara Falls…"
--- Fixing Niagara Falls is an excellent monograph that cleverly analyzes how engineering interventions and human hubris helped make the Niagara Falls that we are familiar with today. ---Historians and general readers interested in the Falls and in issues connected with the associated technological and political background will appreciate this work.
--- Macfarlane has crafted an exemplary work of scholarship.Topics
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Front Matter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Illustrations
viii -
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Foreword
xi -
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Acknowledgments
xxvii -
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Abbreviations
xxxi -
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Introduction
3 -
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Harnessing Niagara: Developments up to the Twentieth Century
17 -
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Saving Niagara: Innovation and Change in the Early Twentieth Century
39 -
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Negotiating Niagara: Environmental Diplomacy and the 1950 Treaty
63 -
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Empowering Niagara: Diversions and Generating Stations
90 -
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Disguising Niagara: The Horseshoe Falls Waterscape
131 -
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Preserving Niagara: The American Falls Campaign
167 -
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Conclusion
197 -
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Notes
210 -
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Bibliography
271 -
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Index
291
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 3, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9780774864244
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
332
eBook ISBN:
9780774864244
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
