...makes some notable contributions to the popular and scholarly literature about the Niagara region...a welcome addition to the literature of US-Canada cross-border studies. -The Canadian Historical Review...provides a most engaging and eloquently written story, a learned tale of the Niagara region's associated historical triumphs and abiding challenges. The book's geographical and social histories will be of interest not only to residents of the Niagara Frontier but to anyone who has ever been fascinated by the complexly related natural and technological wonders that have helped to make Niagara one of the world's most famous and enduring icons. -ISLEThis in-depth regional study of the Niagara Frontier traces the evolution of landscape and patterns of settlement on both sides of the Niagara River extending from St. Catharines, Ontario, to Lockport, New York. This significant region, astride an international frontier, both connects and separates, unites and divides Canadian and American territories bordering the Niagara River.Like map overlays that build on an underlying base geography, Professor Jackson's chronological approach begins with the qualities of the physical background and their ongoing ramifications up to the present for the use and development of land. He then adds the Native settlements, showing their trails and economic activities, while highlighting the amazing fact that certain Native features remain an intrinsic part of the modern landscape. The next time period reveals that the previous human landscapes, once continuous across the Niagara River, became acutely discontinuous with the creation in 1783 of an unseen but divisive international boundary.Subsequent chapters follow the changes over the course of time as canals, railways, hydroelectric power, and the dominance of the automobile in the present era all transform the environment. Jackson also discusses Niagara Falls as the fulcrum around which the Niagara Frontier has developed and the impact of the tourist industry on the region. This thorough analysis of an important international region will be of great use to students of regional, urban, and historical geography as well as to anyone involved in cross-boundary trade, education, or tourism.John N. Jackson (St. Catharines, Ontario) is professor emeritus of applied geography at Brock University and the author of fourteen previous books on regional geography and history.John Burtniak (St. Catharines), now retired, was the special collections librarian and university archivist at Brock University.Gregory P. Stein (Buffalo, NY) is associate professor of geography and planning at SUNY College at Buffalo.

Full of heroes and villains, eccentrics and daredevils, scientists, and power brokers, Niagara has a contemporary resonance: how a great natural wonder created both the industrial heartland of southern Ontario and the worst pollution on the continent.

Maury Klein is one of America's most acclaimed historians of business and society. In The Power Makers, he offers an epic narrative of his greatest subject yet - the "power revolution" that transformed American life in the course of the nineteenth century. The steam engine; the incandescent bulb; the electric motor-inventions such as these replaced backbreaking toil with machine labor and changed every aspect of daily life in the span of a few generations. The cast of characters includes inventors like James Watt, Elihu Thomson, and Nikola Tesla; entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse; savvy businessmen like J.P. Morgan, Samuel Insull, and Charles Coffin of General Electric. Striding among them like a colossus is the figure of Thomas Edison, who was creative genius and business visionary at once. With consummate skill, Klein recreates their discoveries, their stunning triumphs and frequent failures, and their unceasing, bare-knuckled battles in the marketplace. In Klein's hands, their personalities and discoveries leap off the page. The Power Makers is a dazzling saga of inspired invention, dogged persistence, and business competition at its most naked and cutthroat--a biography of America in its most astonishing decades.

“It might be the best book on animals I’ve ever read. It's also the only one that's made me laugh out loud.” —Helen Macdonald, The New York Times Book Review Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the sixteen essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whip-smart essays, from a winner of a Whiting Award for nonfiction, traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life. “Stunning . . . Passarello’s keen wit is on display throughout as she raises questions about the uniqueness of humans. . . . A feast of surprising juxtapositions and gorgeous prose.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “I’ve spent decades reading books on the roles animals play in human cultures, but none have ever made me think, and feel, as much as this one. It’s a devastating meditation on our relationship to the natural world.” —Helen Macdonald, The New York Times Book Review

Uses maps to illustrate the development of Canada from the last ice sheet to the end of the eighteenth century