Sailing the Sweetwater Seas: Wooden Boats and Ships on the Great Lakes, 1817-1940

The Great Lakes were America’s first superhighway before railroad lines and roads arrived in the late nineteenth century. This book tells the story of the ships and boats on which the United States, barely decades old, moved to the country’s middle and beyond, established a robust industrial base, and became a world power, despite enduring a bloody Civil War. The “five sisters,” as the Great Lakes came to be called, would connect America’s far-reaching regions in the century ahead, carrying...