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3 books match the query 'Great Lake'

cover of Across the Great Lake

Across the Great Lake

Lee Zacharias

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

"It was a huge and powerful ship with a tall, handsome pilothouse and big smoking stacks, no place for a girl, though I loved it, I cannot tell you how much I loved it." In her eighty-fifth year, Fern Halvorson tells the story of a childhood journey across Lake Michigan and the secret she has kept since that ill-fated voyage.

As his wife lies dying in the brutally cold winter of 1936, Henrik Halvorsen takes his daughter Fern away with him. He captains a great coal-fired vessel, the Manitou, transporting railroad cars across the icy lake. The five-year-old girl revels in the freedom of the ferry, making friends with a stowaway cat and a gentle young deckhand. The sighting of a ghost ship, though, presages danger for all aboard.
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cover of Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan

Great Lake

An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan

Theodore J. Karamanski

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Looking down from outer space a vast expanse of blue appears in the heart of North America. Of the magnificent chain of inland seas, only one of those bodies of water—Lake Michigan—is entirely within the boundaries of the United States. Lake Michigan has been uniquely shaped by its relationship with humans, since its geological evolution took place at the same time as Paleo-Indian peoples interacted with the changing environment. Each generation of humans has altered the lake to suit society’s changing needs, dredging harbors, building lighthouses, digging canals and channels, filling in shallows, and obliterating wetlands.

Great Lake is a comprehensive survey of the manifold ways Americans, from the first Native American communities to the present age, have abused, nurtured, loved, and neglected this massive freshwater resource. Extending 307 miles from north to south, the lake cuts across climatic, environmental, and physiographic zones, from the prairies of Illinois to the boreal forests of the north. Bordered by large cities like Chicago and Milwaukee as well as smaller Wisconsin resorts and northern Michigan mines and mill towns, the lake touches people in urban centers and countryside. Thus, the history of Lake Michigan combines the history of frontier resource extraction, agricultural abundance, industrialization, and dense urbanization in the American heartland. Great Lake is the story of the ever-escalating and divergent demands Americans have placed on Lake Michigan, how the lake’s ecosystem responded to those changes, and how together they have shaped the modern American Midwest.
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cover of Rafts, Raccons, & Revelations: Growing Up on a Great Lake

Rafts, Raccons, & Revelations

Growing Up on a Great Lake

Pete Griffin

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2021

Man recounts his boyhood in sparsely populated, near-wilderness area along the USA-Canada border, with an emphasis on encounters with wildlife and natural phenomena and conclusions/observations of human nature and the intersection of civilization as it meets the natural world.
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