Description
Book SynopsisThroughout the nineteenth century, the southern shores of Lake Superior held great promise for developers imagining the next great metropolis. These new territories were seen as expanses to be filled, first with romantic visions, then with scientific images, and later with vistas designed to entice settlement and economic development.
Trade Review“If you are looking for a fine piece of scholarship that elegantly melds historical geography and environmental history … this is your book.… Beautifully written and well researched.… Anyone who specializes in the history of the Great Lakes or midwestern history should read this book.” * Michigan Historical Review *
“Olmanson vividly demonstrates how the imaginings of human beings intersected with the realities of a given physical setting. He is especially good at discerning the meaning in stories people tell about themselves and the places they discover and inhabit.” * American Quarterly *
“Gracefully written, Olmanson’s reading of the evidence is sophisticated and nuanced. An excellent study of important aspects of the exploration and development of a specific region over a periodof time.”
“Eric Olmanson has traced the frontier history of Lake Superior in a most unusual and creative way: as a series of past human imaginings of alternative future landscapes. Interpreted through the lens of this thought-provoking book, maps and topographic descriptions become windows into human dreams, revealing imaginative geographies that eventually produced profound material changes in the regional landscape. Olmanson’s findings have implications for American historical geography that reach far beyond the shores of the greatest of of Great Lakes.”
“Though the future has turned out quite differently, readers will enjoy thinking about how the future was seen so long ago and the factors that have changed that vision.” * Mazina’igan *
