List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Prologue 1. Leaving Lockport: And Returning to the Canal's Beginning 2. Locating Lockport: The Canal and the Continent's Last Barrier 3. Cutting Lockport: Laborers, Citizens, and Five Years at the Mountain Ridge 4. Writing Lockport: A Dialogue on American Progress 5. Losing Lockport: Afterlife of the Mountain Ridge Conquest APPENDIX: Mountain Ridge Contractors Notes Index
Patrick McGreevy is Professor of History and Director of the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut. He is the author of Imagining Niagara: The Meaning and Making of Niagara Falls.
"Historians of technology will appreciate [McGreevy's] efforts to highlight the interconnectedness of environmental, social, and technological agents in Lockport's transition from a central node in America's nineteenth-century transportation infrastructure to a largely forgotten, postindustrial backwater." - Technology and Culture "Stairway to Empire offers a rare combination: a scholarly monograph with an autobiographical twist. In this labor of love, Patrick McGreevy ... offers a richly textured biography of his hometown of Lockport, New York ... It is deeply researched, interdisciplinary in nature, and written with sophistication and clarity." - Journal of American History "...McGreevy has produced a volume that not only details the story of the Erie Canal's completion but also considers its importance as a physical representation of American ideals, its significance as a tangible symbol of nineteenth-century national philosophy and its place in the larger narrative of American modernity and progress." - The Canadian Geographer "This is an assessment of a brief moment of nationwide prominence and the persisting realities of the meaning of change for not only Lockport, but for every community." - CHOICE "In this sagacious and thought-provoking study, McGreevy explores the multiple meanings of a once-renowned and significant American place experiencing the profound changes of industrialism and the onrushing market economy." - Edward K. Muller, University of Pittsburgh
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