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28 books match the query 'Navigation'

cover of "A Fully Accredited Ocean": Essays on the Great Lakes

"A Fully Accredited Ocean"

Essays on the Great Lakes

Victoria Brehm, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1998

In this collection, Victoria Brehm has brought together scholars and writers from Canada and the United States to explore the fascinating maritime history of the Great Lakes. The essays in “A Fully Accredited Ocean” answer many questions about life, shipping, and the economy of the Great Lakes and offer insight and knowledge reflecting decades of accumulated research and study. From the outset, the reader will see that Great Lakes maritime history is a good deal more than storms and shipwrecks.The issues presented here address the fundamentals of existence of life on the lakes for a period of nearly two centuries. These essays bring to light some of the massive disruptions that affected the Great Lakes region as it became one of the most industrialized areas on the continent. The essayists explore the culture of the lakes through the archaeological investigation of the War of 1812 brig Jefferson, women on the lakes, fishing crafts of Isle Royale, and through personal narrative that touches on the competing concerns of occupational fisherman, sports enthusiasts, lake biologists, and the state.In this collection of scholarly essays devoted exclusively to Great Lakes maritime history, the contributors share their experiences of working in this complicated field. These experiences are not only valuable to other researchers but give the nonspecialist a glimpse into the world of the working historian of the Great Lakes. “A Fully Accredited Ocean” acquaints us more intimately with technological and social change in the Great Lakes region.
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cover of A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America

A History of the Chicago Portage

The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America

Benjamin Sells

Northwestern University Press, 2021

Seven muddy miles transformed a region and a nation

This fascinating account explores the significance of the Chicago Portage, one of the most important—and neglected—sites in early US history. A seven-mile-long strip of marsh connecting the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, the portage was inhabited by the earliest indigenous people in the Midwest and served as a major trade route for Native American tribes. A link between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, the Chicago Portage was a geopolitically significant resource that the French, British, and US governments jockeyed to control. Later, it became a template for some of the most significant waterways created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The portage gave Chicago its name and spurred the city’s success—and is the reason why the metropolis is located in Illinois, not Wisconsin.
 
A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America is the definitive story of a national landmark.
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cover of A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks

A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks

Stewart Gordon

University Press of New England, 2017

Stories of disasters at sea, whether about Roman triremes, the treasure fleet of the Spanish Main, or great transatlantic ocean liners, fire the imagination as little else can. From the historical sinkings of the Titanic and the Lusitania to the recent capsizing of a Mediterranean cruise ship, the study of shipwrecks also makes for a new and very different understanding of world history. A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks explores the age-old, immensely hazardous, persistently romantic, and ongoing process of moving people and goods across the seven seas. In recounting the stories of ships and the people who made and sailed them, from the earliest craft plying the ancient Nile to the Exxon Valdez, Stewart Gordon argues that the gradual integration of mainly local and separate maritime domains into fewer, larger, and more interdependent regions offers a unique perspective on world history. Gordon draws a number of provocative conclusions from his study, among them that the European “Age of Exploration” as a singular event is simply a myth: over the millennia, many cultures, east and west, have explored far-flung maritime worlds, and technologies of shipbuilding and navigation have been among the main drivers of science and exploration throughout history. In a series of compelling narratives, A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks shows that the development of institutions and technologies that made the terrifying oceans familiar and turned unknown seas into well-traveled sea-lanes matters profoundly in our modern world.
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cover of Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640

Across the Green Sea

Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

University of Texas Press, 2024

A history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa.

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultural exchange and transformation. Using a variety of texts and documents in multiple Asian and European languages, Across the Green Sea looks at the history of the ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints: western India; the Red Sea and Mecca; the Persian Gulf; East Africa; and Kerala.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam sets the scene for this region starting with the withdrawal of China's Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century. Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant center and its dominated peripheries, Across the Green Sea demonstrates the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method pioneered by Subrahmanyam himself.

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cover of After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century

After the Map

Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century

William Rankin

University of Chicago Press, 2016

For most of the twentieth century, maps were indispensable. They were how governments understood, managed, and defended their territory, and during the two world wars they were produced by the hundreds of millions. Cartographers and journalists predicted the dawning of a “map-minded age,” where increasingly state-of-the-art maps would become everyday tools. By the century’s end, however, there had been decisive shift in mapping practices, as the dominant methods of land surveying and print publication were increasingly displaced by electronic navigation systems.
           
In After the Map, William Rankin argues that although this shift did not render traditional maps obsolete, it did radically change our experience of geographic knowledge, from the God’s-eye view of the map to the embedded subjectivity of GPS. Likewise, older concerns with geographic truth and objectivity have been upstaged by a new emphasis on simplicity, reliability, and convenience. After the Map shows how this change in geographic perspective is ultimately a transformation of the nature of territory, both social and political.
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cover of Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas

Ancient Ocean Crossings

Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas

Stephen C. Jett

University of Alabama Press, 2017

Paints a compelling picture of impressive pre-Columbian cultures and Old World civilizations that, contrary to many prevailing notions, were not isolated from one another
 
In Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas, Stephen Jett encourages readers to reevaluate the common belief that there was no significant interchange between the chiefdoms and civilizations of Eurasia and Africa and peoples who occupied the alleged terra incognita beyond the great oceans.
 
More than a hundred centuries separate the time that Ice Age hunters are conventionally thought to have crossed a land bridge from Asia into North America and the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492. Traditional belief has long held that earth’s two hemispheres were essentially cut off from one another as a result of the post-Pleistocene meltwater-fed rising oceans that covered that bridge. The oceans, along with arctic climates and daunting terrestrial distances, formed impermeable barriers to interhemispheric communication. This viewpoint implies that the cultures of the Old World and those of the Americas developed independently.
 
Drawing on abundant and concrete evidence to support his theory for significant pre-Columbian contacts, Jett suggests that many ancient peoples had both the seafaring capabilities and the motives to cross the oceans and, in fact, did so repeatedly and with great impact. His deep and broad work synthesizes information and ideas from archaeology, geography, linguistics, climatology, oceanography, ethnobotany, genetics, medicine, and the history of navigation and seafaring, making an innovative and persuasive multidisciplinary case for a new understanding of human societies and their diffuse but interconnected development.
 
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cover of Captain W. W. Withenbury's 1838-1842 "Red River Reminiscences"

Captain W. W. Withenbury's 1838-1842 "Red River Reminiscences"

Jacques D. Bagur

University of North Texas Press, 2014

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cover of Cartographies of Travel and Navigation

Cartographies of Travel and Navigation

Edited by James R. Akerman

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Finding one’s way with a map is a relatively recent phenomenon. In premodern times, maps were used, if at all, mainly for planning journeys in advance, not for guiding travelers on the road. With the exception of navigational sea charts, the use of maps by travelers only became common in the modern era; indeed, in the last two hundred years, maps have become the most ubiquitous and familiar genre of modern cartography.

Examining the historical relationship between travelers, navigation, and maps, Cartographies of Travel and Navigation considers the cartographic response to the new modalities of modern travel brought about by technological and institutional developments in the twentieth century. Highlighting the ways in which the travelers, operators, and planners of modern transportation systems value maps as both navigation tools and as representatives of a radical new mobility, this collection brings the cartography of travel—by road, sea, rail, and air—to the forefront, placing maps at the center of the history of travel and movement.

Richly and colorfully illustrated, Cartographies of Travel and Navigation ably fills the void in historical literature on transportation mapping.

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cover of Edgar Allan Poe - American Writers 89: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers

Edgar Allan Poe - American Writers 89

University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers

Roger Asselineau

University of Minnesota Press, 1970

Edgar Allan Poe - American Writers 89 was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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cover of From the Center of America: Steamboats and Shipyards Along the Lower Ohio River

From the Center of America

Steamboats and Shipyards Along the Lower Ohio River

Robert H. Swenson

Southern Illinois University Press, 2026

Charting the legacy of mid-America's shipyards and iconic steamboats

Before the railroad stitched together the American landscape, the dominant mode of transportation in the United States was by steamboat. These grand vessels, their iconic paddlewheels churning the country’s rivers, have long captured the national imagination as symbols of innovation and adventure.

In the heart of America, four major rivers converge—the Cumberland and Tennessee with the Ohio; then the Ohio with the Mississippi. These three confluences, which author Robert Swenson christens the Four Rivers Reach, played a unique role in the development of the steamboats that dominated American continental transport for almost 100 years. Between 1825 and 1936, the river towns of Smithland, Paducah, Metropolis, Mound City, and Cairo launched 295 wood-hulled, steam-powered vessels. Drawing from a wealth of archival sources, Swenson presents detailed histories of these steamboats over a span of 110 years, accompanied by nearly one hundred illustrations and photographs.

The book focuses on distinct events in steamboat history, tracing the impact of these shipyards on the economies and communities of the river towns where they were built. It reveals how the availability of steamboats along this sixty-mile Reach affected migration, politics, and the US economy of the nineteenth century. Steamboats built at the Four Rivers Reach played pivotal roles in the forced relocation of Native Americans from southern Appalachia to Oklahoma, the outcome of the Civil War, and the Montana gold rush. From the Center of America demonstrates how steamboat building shaped the culture, people, and economy of this region—and how, in turn, the area and its steamships influenced the growth of the young United States.

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cover of Globes: 400 Years of Exploration, Navigation, and Power

Globes

400 Years of Exploration, Navigation, and Power

Sylvia Sumira

University of Chicago Press, 2014

The concept of the earth as a sphere has been around for centuries, emerging around the time of Pythagoras in the sixth century BC, and eventually becoming dominant as other thinkers of the ancient world, including Plato and Aristotle, accepted the idea. The first record of an actual globe being made is found in verse, written by the poet Aratus of Soli, who describes a celestial sphere of the stars by Greek astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus (ca. 408–355 BC). The oldest surviving globe—a celestial globe held up by Atlas’s shoulders—dates back to 150 AD, but in the West, globes were not made again for about a thousand years. It was not until the fifteenth century that terrestrial globes gained importance, culminating when German geographer Martin Behaim created what is thought to be the oldest surviving terrestrial globe. In Globes: 400 Years of Exploration, Navigation, and Power, Sylvia Sumira, beginning with Behaim’s globe, offers a authoritative and striking illustrated history of the subsequent four hundred years of globe making.  
           
Showcasing the impressive collection of globes held by the British Library, Sumira traces the inception and progression of globes during the period in which they were most widely used—from the late fifteenth century to the late nineteenth century—shedding light on their purpose, function, influence, and manufacture, as well as the cartographers, printers, and instrument makers who created them. She takes readers on a chronological journey around the world to examine a wide variety of globes, from those of the Renaissance that demonstrated a renewed interest in classical thinkers; to those of James Wilson, the first successful commercial globe maker in America; to those mass-produced in Boston and New York beginning in the 1800s. Along the way, Sumira not only details the historical significance of each globe, but also pays special attention to their materials and methods of manufacture and how these evolved over the centuries.
           
A stunning and accessible guide to one of the great tools of human exploration, Globes will appeal to historians, collectors, and anyone who has ever examined this classroom accessory and wondered when, why, and how they came to be made.
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cover of Great Ships on the Great Lakes: A Maritime History

Great Ships on the Great Lakes

A Maritime History

Bobbie Malone

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013

In this highly accessible history of ships and shipping on the Great Lakes, upper elementary readers are taken on a rip-roaring journey through the waterways of the upper Midwest.

Great Ships on the Great Lakes explores the history of the region’s rivers, lakes, and inland seas—and the people and ships who navigated them. Read along as the first peoples paddle tributaries in birch bark canoes. Follow as European voyageurs pilot rivers and lakes to get beaver pelts back to the eastern market. Watch as settlers build towns and eventually cities on the shores of the Great Lakes. Listen to the stories of sailors, lighthouse keepers, and shipping agents whose livelihoods depended on the dangerous waters of Lake Michigan, Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. Give an ear to their stories of unexpected tragedy and miraculous rescue, and heed their tales of risk and reward on the low seas.

Great Ships also tells the story of sea battles and gunships, of the first vessels to travel beyond the Niagara, and of the treacherous storms and cold weather that caused thousands of ships to sink in the Great Lakes. Watch as underwater archaeologists solve the mysteries of Great Lakes shipwrecks today. And learn how the shift from sail to steam forever changed the history of shipping, as schooners made way for steamships and bulk freighters, and sailing became a recreation, not a hazardous way of life.

Designed for the upper elementary classroom with emphasis on Michigan and Wisconsin, Great Ships on the Great Lakes includes a timeline of events, on-page vocabulary, and a list of resources and places to visit. Over 20 maps highlight the region’s maritime history. The accompanying Teacher’s Guide includes 18 classroom activities, arranged by chapter, including lessons on exploring shipwrecks and learning how glaciers moved across the landscape.

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cover of Guardian of the Great Lakes: The U.S. Paddle Frigate Michigan

Guardian of the Great Lakes

The U.S. Paddle Frigate Michigan

Bradley A. Rodgers

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Guardian of the Great Lakes is the saga of the USS Michigan, an archetype iron-hulled war steamer launched in 1843. Its mission was to patrol the ofttimes volatile Great Lakes region, quelling port town civil disturbances, while at the same time rescuing both Canadian and American ships in distress.

The Michigan found itself unavoidably attracted to calamity, leaving in its wake a collection of eyewitness accounts to these momentous yet largely forgotten occurences. Incidents such as the timber rebellion of the 1850s, which occurred in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan, are documented for the first time. Other episodes such as the assassination of "king" Strang on Beaver Island and the destruction of the community there are studied under the light of newly discovered sources. Still other chapters reveal the chaos created by the Civil War on the lakes, the destructive mining strikes of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the tragic, bloody, Fenian invasion of Canada.

Between major calamities lay the vagaries of maritime life on the Great Lakes detailed in the records of the Michigan's crew. From their social and community life in Erie, Pennsylvania to storms, shipwrecks, and sickness, the records kept by the men and officers of the USS Michigan have helped to produce in this book an accurate and detailed narrative of naval and maritime life on the Great Lakes during this important period.

Bradley A. Rodgers is Assistant Professor, Program in Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology, East Carolina University.

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cover of Guide to Peril Strait and Wrangell Narrows, Alaska

Guide to Peril Strait and Wrangell Narrows, Alaska

William Morgan Hopkins

University of Alaska Press, 2020

Learning how to pilot a ship through Wrangell Narrows and Peril Strait is not an easy matter for a vessel operator new to the area, or even for those with experience. It takes time, patience, and a certain appetite for risk. The older generation of captains knew the channels in great detail, but they did not write anything down to leave for the next generation coming up through the ranks. Recognizing the wealth of the knowledge these navigators possessed in their memories, William Hopkins decided to document their charts and methods as he himself learned to maneuver ships through these important and narrow southeastern Alaska channels. A now retired captain who logged many voyages, Hopkins delineates the navigable courses for passing these treacherous waterways in this essential guide.
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cover of Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography: Hula, Navigation, and Oratory

Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography

Hula, Navigation, and Oratory

Renee Pualani Louis

Oregon State University Press, 2017

Hawai'ian performance cartography is an interactive presentation of place as ‘experienced space’ that situates mapping in the environment, and encodes spatial knowledge into bodily memory via repetitive recitations and other habitual practices.
 
An important symbolic element in Hawai'ian cartography is the storied place name, which reflects Hawai'ian spatial knowledge of the environment. Many Hawai'ian place names performed in daily rituals were a conscious act of locating genealogical connections, recreating cultural landscapes, and regenerating cultural mores. They constitute a critically important body of Hawai'ian cultural knowledge. When Hawai'ian place names were incorporated into Western cartographic maps they were transformed epistemologically. They went from representing place as a repository of cultural knowledge to representing place as an object on the landscape. Hawai'ian spatial knowledge presentation is interactive, multi-sensual, and multi‐ dimensional.
 
Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography interweaves methodology with personal narrative and performance presentation in a playbill format. Three of the seven chapters are presented as “Acts” in a play. The remaining four chapters serve as intermissions or interludes together with a prologue and an epilogue for setting the stage and providing closure. To help make the topic more accessible, complex terms have been minimized, making academic theory easier for the educated reader to understand. The book will fill an important gap in Indigenous and Native Studies and will be welcomed by anyone interested in traditional Hawai’ian performance cartography.
 
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cover of Ladies of the Lights: Michigan Women in the U.S. Lighthouse Service

Ladies of the Lights

Michigan Women in the U.S. Lighthouse Service

Patricia Majher

University of Michigan Press, 2010

"A great read about some great ladies, Pat Majher's Ladies of the Lights pays long overdue homage to an overlooked part of Great Lakes maritime history in which a select group of stalwart women beat the odds to succeed in a field historically reserved for men."
---Terry Pepper, Executive Director of Great Lakes Lighthouse Keeper's Association

Michigan once led the country in the number of lighthouses, and they're still a central part of the mystique and colorful countryside of the state. What even the region's lighthouse enthusiasts might not know is the rich history of female lighthouse keepers in the area.

Fifty women served the sailing communities on Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior, as well as on the Detroit River, for more than 100 years. From Catherine Shook, who raised eight children while maintaining the Pointe Aux Barques light at the entrance to Saginaw Bay; to Eliza Truckey, who assumed responsibility for the lighthouse in Marquette while her husband fought for four years in the Civil War; to Elizabeth Whitney, whose combined service on Beaver Island and in Harbor Springs totaled forty-one years---the stories of Michigan's "ladies of the light" are inspiring.

This is no technical tome documenting the minutiae of Michigan's lighthouse specifications. Rather, it's a detailed, human portrait of the women who kept those lighthouses running, defying the gender expectations of their time.

Patricia Majher is Editor of Michigan History magazine, published by the Historical Society of Michigan. Prior, she was Assistant Director of the Michigan Women's Historical Center and Hall of Fame in Lansing, Michigan. In addition, she has been writing both advertising and editorial copy for almost thirty years and has been a frequent contributor to Michigan newspapers and magazines.

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cover of Mastering the Inland Seas: How Lighthouses, Navigational Aids, and Harbors Transformed the Great Lakes and America

Mastering the Inland Seas

How Lighthouses, Navigational Aids, and Harbors Transformed the Great Lakes and America

Theodore J. Karamanski

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

Theodore J. Karamanski's sweeping maritime history demonstrates the far-ranging impact that the tools and infrastructure developed for navigating the Great Lakes had on the national economies, politics, and environment of continental North America. Synthesizing popular as well as original historical scholarship, Karamanski weaves a colorful narrative illustrating how disparate private and government interests transformed these vast and dangerous waters into the largest inland water transportation system in the world.
Karamanski explores both the navigational and sailing tools of First Nations peoples and the dismissive and foolhardy attitude of early European maritime sailors. He investigates the role played by commercial boats in the Underground Railroad, as well as how the federal development of crucial navigational resources exacerbated sectionalism in the antebellum United States. Ultimately Mastering the Inland Sea shows the undeniable environmental impact of technologies used by the modern commercial maritime industry. This expansive story illuminates the symbiotic relationship between infrastructure investment in the region's interconnected waterways and North America's lasting economic and political development.
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cover of Navigation and Control of Autonomous Marine Vehicles

Navigation and Control of Autonomous Marine Vehicles

Sanjay Sharma

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019

Robotic marine vessels can be used for a wide range of purposes, including defence, marine science, offshore energy and hydrographic surveys, and environmental surveys and protection. Such vessels need to meet a variety of criteria: they must be able to operate in salt water, and to communicate and be controlled over large distances, even when submerged or in inclement weather. Further challenges include 3D navigation of individual vehicles, groups or squadrons.
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cover of Rafts and Other Rivercraft: in Huckleberry Finn

Rafts and Other Rivercraft

in Huckleberry Finn

Peter G. Beidler

University of Missouri Press, 2018

The raft that carries Huck and Jim down the Mississippi River is often seen as a symbol of adventure and freedom, but the physical specifics of the raft itself are rarely considered. Peter Beidler shows that understanding the material world of Huckleberry Finn, its limitations and possibilities, is vital to truly understanding Mark Twain’s novel. He illustrates how experts on Twain’s works have misinterpreted important aspects of the story due to their unfamiliarity with the various rivercraft that figure in the book.
 
Huck and Jim’s little raft is not made of logs, as it is often depicted in illustrations, but of sawn planks, and it was originally part of a much larger raft. Beidler explains why this matters and describes the other rivercraft that appear in the book. He gives what will almost certainly be the last word on the vexed question of whether the lengthy “raft episode,” removed at the publisher’s suggestion from the novel, should be restored to its original place.
 
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cover of Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection

Rhumb Lines and Map Wars

A Social History of the Mercator Projection

Mark Monmonier

University of Chicago Press, 2004

In Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier offers an insightful, richly illustrated account of the controversies surrounding Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator's legacy. He takes us back to 1569, when Mercator announced a clever method of portraying the earth on a flat surface, creating the first projection to take into account the earth's roundness. As Monmonier shows, mariners benefited most from Mercator's projection, which allowed for easy navigation of the high seas with rhumb lines—clear-cut routes with a constant compass bearing—for true direction. But the projection's popularity among nineteenth-century sailors led to its overuse—often in inappropriate, non-navigational ways—for wall maps, world atlases, and geopolitical propaganda.

Because it distorts the proportionate size of countries, the Mercator map was criticized for inflating Europe and North America in a promotion of colonialism. In 1974, German historian Arno Peters proffered his own map, on which countries were ostensibly drawn in true proportion to one another. In the ensuing "map wars" of the 1970s and 1980s, these dueling projections vied for public support—with varying degrees of success.

Widely acclaimed for his accessible, intelligent books on maps and mapping, Monmonier here examines the uses and limitations of one of cartography's most significant innovations. With informed skepticism, he offers insightful interpretations of why well-intentioned clerics and development advocates rallied around the Peters projection, which flagrantly distorted the shape of Third World nations; why journalists covering the controversy ignored alternative world maps and other key issues; and how a few postmodern writers defended the Peters worldview with a self-serving overstatement of the power of maps. Rhumb Lines and Map Wars is vintage Monmonier: historically rich, beautifully written, and fully engaged with the issues of our time.
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cover of Sail, Steam, and Diesel: Moving Cargo on the Great Lakes

Sail, Steam, and Diesel

Moving Cargo on the Great Lakes

Eric Hirsimaki

Michigan State University Press, 2024

Water transportation has played a key role in the Great Lakes region’s settlement and economic growth, from providing entry into the new lake states to offering cheap transportation for the goods they produced. There are numerous tales surrounding the Great Lakes shipping trade, but few storytellers have addressed the factors that influenced the use, design, and evolution of the ships that sailed the inland seas. Sail, Steam, and Diesel: Moving Cargo on the Great Lakes provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of Great Lakes ships over the centuries, from small birch-bark canoes originally used in the region to the massive thousand-footers of today. The author also looks at the economics of vessel operation in the context of the expanding scope of the shipping industry, which was crucial in catapulting America into becoming an industrial juggernaut. The captains of industry and the sailors whose labor propelled the trade populate this account, which also offers solemn acknowledgment of the high cost paid in both lost ships and lives. Although they might not realize it, millions of Americans have owed their livelihoods to the Great Lakes boats, and this volume is an excellent way to recognize the importance of this regional industry.
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cover of Ships and Shipwrecks: Stories from the Great Lakes

Ships and Shipwrecks

Stories from the Great Lakes

Richard Gebhart

Michigan State University Press, 2022

From the day that French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle launched the Griffin in 1679 to the 1975 sinking of the celebrated Edmund Fitzgerald, thousands of commercial ships have sailed on the vast and perilous waters of the Great Lakes. In a harbinger of things to come, on the return leg of its first trip in late summer 1679, the Griffin disappeared and has never been seen again. In the centuries since then, the records show that an alarming number of shipwrecks have occurred on the Great Lakes. If vessels that wrecked but were later repaired and returned to service are included, the number certainly swells into the thousands. Most did not mysteriously vanish like the Griffin. Instead, they suffered the occupational hazards of every lake boat: collisions, groundings, strands, fires, boiler explosions, and capsizes. Many of these disasters took the lives of crews and passengers. The fearsome wrath of the storms that brew over the Great Lakes has challenged and defeated some of the staunchest vessels constructed in the shipyards of port cities along the U.S. and Canadian lakeshores. Here Richard Gebhart tells the tales of some of these ships and their captains and crews, from their launches to their sad demises—or sometimes, their celebrated retirements. This volume is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the maritime history of the Great Lakes.
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cover of Steamboats on the Colorado River, 1852-1916

Steamboats on the Colorado River, 1852-1916

Richard E. Lingenfelter

University of Arizona Press, 1978

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cover of Stories from the Wreckage: A Great Lakes Maritime History Inspired by Shipwrecks

Stories from the Wreckage

A Great Lakes Maritime History Inspired by Shipwrecks

John Odin Jensen

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019

Every shipwreck has a story that extends far beyond its tragic end. The dramatic tales of disaster, heroism, and folly become even more compelling when viewed as junction points in history—connecting to stories about the frontier, the environment, immigration, politics, technology, and industry. In Stories from the Wreckage, John Odin Jensen examines a selection of Great Lakes shipwrecks of the wooden age for a deeper dive into this transformative chapter of maritime history. He mines the archeological evidence and historic record to show how their tragic ends fit in with the larger narrative of Midwestern history. Featuring the underwater photography of maritime archeologist Tamara Thomsen, this vibrant volume is a must-have for shipping enthusiasts as well as anyone interested in the power of water to shape history.
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cover of Taming the Muskingum

Taming the Muskingum

EMORY L. KEMP

West Virginia University Press, 2014

A tributary of the Ohio River and significant commercial route in the nineteenth century, the Muskingum River in southeastern Ohio presents a remarkable case study of how Americans have managed their waterways. In Taming the Muskingum, esteemed scholar Emory Kemp traces this history, emphasizing the engineering and construction aspects of river navigation and the fourteen related flood control dams built under the direction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Kemp’s study ranges from early settlement and navigation of the uncontrolled Muskingum to the state-of-the-art engineering projects undertaken during the New Deal to more recent conservation and recreation uses. llustrated with drawings, photographs, and maps showing many aspects of the dam and reservoir system as well as the Muskingum slackwater navigation, Taming the Muskingum is a rich evocation of a navigation system that is today recognized as a national Historical Civil Engineering Landmark. 
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cover of The Maritime World of the Anglo-Saxons

The Maritime World of the Anglo-Saxons

Stacy S. Klein

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014

The twenty-first century has been marked by an “oceanic turn” and by groundbreaking new research on the previously hidden depths of maritime life, literature, and culture. The Maritime World of the Anglo-Saxons builds upon these new areas of research as the first major volume of essays to explore Anglo-Saxon England’s complex relationship to its maritime history, economy, and sensibilities. Individual essays focus on maritime travel, Viking invasions by sea, littoral culture, the archeology of the whale, and literary mythologies of monstrous sea creatures, bringing together insights from a range of disciplines: archeology, history, literature, paleography, linguistics, art history, critical theory, geography, and cultural studies.
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cover of The River We Have Wrought: A History of the Upper Mississippi

The River We Have Wrought

A History of the Upper Mississippi

John O. Anfinson

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

The River We Have Wrought is a landmark history of the upper Mississippi, from early European exploration through the completion of a navigable channel and a system of locks and dams in the mid-twentieth century. John Anfinson examines how politics has shaped the landscapes of the Upper Midwest and how taming the Mississippi River has affected economic sustainability, river ecology, and biological diversity.
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cover of Wilderness Route Finder: The Classic Guide to Finding Your Way in the Wild

Wilderness Route Finder

The Classic Guide to Finding Your Way in the Wild

Calvin Rutstrum

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

An indispensable resource for navigating the wild.

In the days before cell phones and global positioning systems, knowing how to find your own way in the wilderness was a vitally important skill. The Wilderness Route Finder, first published in 1967, was the popular resource for anyone venturing into the woods who wanted to find their way out again. Now this essential book is available once more in a handy paperback edition.

As more and more people seek to simplify their wilderness experiences and return to traditional camping methods, Rutstrum’s simple, straightforward, and dependable methods can be appreciated anew. Rutstrum focuses on the tried-and-true techniques that have served wilderness travelers for generations: how to use a map, a compass, a sextant, and the sun and stars. He explains why we sometimes get lost and what we should do when we are. This is a valuable traveling companion for anyone wishing to hunt, fish, explore, camp, or simply walk through unfamiliar territory.
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