New York Times Bestseller The epic account of how one narrow ribbon of water forever changed the course of American history. The history of the Erie Canal is a riveting story of American ingenuity. A great project that Thomas Jefferson judged to be “little short of madness,” and that others compared with going to the moon, soon turned into one of the most successful and influential public investments in American history. In Wedding of the Waters, best-selling author Peter L. Bernstein recounts the canal’s creation within the larger tableau of a youthful America in the first quarter-century of the 1800s. Leaders of the fledgling nation had quickly recognized that the Appalachian mountain range was a formidable obstacle to uniting the Atlantic states with the vast lands of the west. A pathway for commerce as well as travel was critical to the security and expansion of the Revolution’s unprecedented achievement. Gripped by the same fever that had driven explorers such as Hudson and Champlain, a motley assortment of politicians, surveyors, and would-be engineers set out to build a complex structure of a type few of them had ever actually seen, let alone built or operated: a manmade waterway cut through the mountains to traverse the 363 miles between Lake Erie and the Hudson River. By linking the seas to the interior and the interior to the seas, these pioneers ultimately connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Bernstein examines the social ramifications, political squabbles, and economic risks and returns of this mammoth project. He goes on to demonstrate how the canal’s creation helped bind the western settlers in the new lands to their fellow Americans in the original colonies, knitted the sinews of the American industrial revolution, and even influenced profound economic change in Europe. Featuring a rich cast of characters that includes political visionaries like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Martin van Buren; the canal’s most powerful champions, Governor DeWitt Clinton and Gouverneur Morris; and a huge platoon of Irish and American diggers, Wedding of the Waters reveals that the twenty-first-century themes of urbanization, economic growth, and globalization can all be traced to the first great macroengineering venture of American history.

Early twentieth-century art and art practice in Britain and the United States were, Janet Wolff asserts, marginalized by critics and historians in very similar ways after the rise of post-Cubist modern art. In a masterly book on the sociology of modernism, Wolff explores work that was primarily realist and figurative and investigates the social, institutional, political, and aesthetic processes by which that art fell by the wayside in the postwar period. Throughout, she shows that questions of gender and ethnicity play an important role in critical, curatorial, and historical evaluations. For example, Wolff finds that the work of the artists central to the development of the Whitney Museum was relegated to a secondary status in the postwar period, when realism was labeled "feminine" in contrast to the aggressive masculinity of abstract expressionism.The three key periods considered in AngloModern are the early twentieth century, when modernist art and existing and new realist traditions coexisted in a certain tension; the postwar period, in which modernism claimed superiority over realism; and the late twentieth century, when a retrieval of the realist and figurative traditions seemed to occur. Wolff concludes by considering this re-emergence, as well as the limitations of earlier discussions of the struggles of realist and figurative art to endure the currents of modernism.

"Born in Ontario, Canada, Harper struggled for twenty-five years as a servant to change her life and that of other working-class women. In 1888, after immigrating to the United States, she pioneered the idea of a public hairdressing salon based on health-conscious precepts. Within three years, her concept was enthusiastically embraced by both the social elite and suffragettes across the country, including Susan B. Anthony and Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell.".