Fixing Niagara Falls

Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall

By Daniel Macfarlane
Categories: Science, Technology & Society, World History, Canadian History, Environmental History, Environmental Politics & Policy
Series: Nature | History | Society
Publisher: UBC Press
Hardcover : 9780774864220, 332 pages, September 2020
Paperback : 9780774864237, 332 pages, March 2021
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774864244, 332 pages, September 2020
Ebook (EPUB) : 9780774864251, 332 pages, September 2020
Ebook (MobiPocket) : 9780774864268, 326 pages, September 2020

Table of contents

Foreword: Iconic Falls, Contrived Landscapes, and Tantalizing Opportunities

Graeme Wynn

Introduction: Characterizing Niagara

1 Harnessing Niagara: Developments up to the Twentieth Century

2 Saving Niagara: Innovation and Change in the Early Twentieth Century

3 Negotiating Niagara: Environmental Diplomacy and the 1950 Treaty

4 Empowering Niagara: Diversions and Generating Stations

5 Disguising Niagara: The Horseshoe Falls Waterscape

6 Preserving Niagara: The American Falls Campaign

Conclusion: Fabricating Niagara

Notes; Bibliography; Index

Description

Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Falls has been heavily engineered to generate energy behind a flowing façade designed to appeal to tourists. Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the technological feats and cross-border politics that facilitated the transformation of one of the most important natural sites in North America. Daniel Macfarlane shows how this natural wonder is essentially a tap: huge tunnels around the reconfigured Falls channel the waters of the Niagara River, which ebb and flow according to the tourism calendar. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary and transborder perspective on how the Niagara landscape embodies the power of technology and nature.

Awards

  • Winner, Honourable Mention - Wilson Book Prize, The Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University  2020

Reviews

Historians and general readers interested in the Falls and in issues connected with the associated technological and political background will appreciate this work.

- A.M. Strauss, Vanderbilt University

With this carefully researched study, we find in Niagara Falls a locus of past concerns that reverberate today: the realities of appropriation, the hubristic underbelly of "green" energy, the politics of energy transitions and exports, the power struggles between provincial, state, and federal governments.

- Kyle Wyatt

Fixing Niagara Falls is an excellent monograph that cleverly analyzes how engineering interventions and human hubris helped make the Niagara Falls that we are familiar with today.

- Clarence Hatton-Proulx

Macfarlane has crafted an exemplary work of scholarship.

- Donald C. Jackson, Lafayette College