War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century

This essay considers the politico-aesthetics of infrastructure by focusing on poems that anticipate, justify, and critique internal improvements, from Joel Barlow’s early Republican vision of the Erie and Panama Canals to texts that document the ruin caused by the works Barlow imagined as glorious. Historical scholarship has long assessed the mania for cutting roads and canals into the landscape. But engaging an emerging infrastructuralism—and turning to imaginative texts that exist underneath the ground typically trod by US literary studies, from Philip Freneau’s celebratory ode to the Erie Canal to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ironic canal travel sketches to Margarita Engle’s recent historical verse-novel tallying the devastations of the Panama Canal—this essay identifies an infrastructural dialectic in which writers view infrastructure, initially, as awesome so as to justify its ecological and social violence and, subsequently, as banal so as to render it invisible within the settler state. Oscillating between awe and irritation, the sublime and the stuplime, then, these texts both expose the rhythm of infrastructure’s long—that is, low—relation to the structure of coloniality and, in Engle’s case, model how to disrupt it so as to imagine a more just life “after” infrastructure.

From the Nile River to the Erie Canal: tracing the photographs of the Zangaki Brothers at George Eastman House

The collection of photographs by the Zangaki Brothers at George Eastman House provides a case study for tracing a trajectory of certain nineteenth century photographic objects made for a tourist market. Beginning with the photographers themselves and the clientele they served, to the albums the photographs were mounted in, the collections they were placed in and the subsequent modern critiques of the photographers, this thesis aims to understand decisions that ultimately define the context in which we now find the photographs.

From the Nile River to the Erie Canal: tracing the photographs of the Zangaki Brothers at George Eastman House

The collection of photographs by the Zangaki Brothers at George Eastman House provides a case study for tracing a trajectory of certain nineteenth century photographic objects made for a tourist market. Beginning with the photographers themselves and the clientele they served, to the albums the photographs were mounted in, the collections they were placed in and the subsequent modern critiques of the photographers, this thesis aims to understand decisions that ultimately define the context in which we now find the photographs.

Upstate and Downstate Avant-Gardes

This chapter talks about the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which connected Buffalo and New York City although they are almost four hundred miles apart. It explains how the canal, which was built to create a navigable east–west waterway from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, transformed New York into what became known as the Empire State during the nineteenth century. It also mentions cities of the East Coast and Great Lakes, midwestern farmlands, and Canadian, British, and European port cities where industries soon settled along the thriving waterfronts of Buffalo and New York, making them prosperous centers for manufacturing and trade. The chapter recounts the construction of the interstate highway system, the Saint Lawrence Seaway, that rendered the Erie Canal completely obsolete by the 1950s. It illustrates how Buffalo and New York City struggled to rebuild in the post-industrial era.

Lake Effect

This chapter talks about Buffalo as a once booming industrial city that enjoyed a prolonged modernist golden age, beginning with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. It describes that the Erie Canal was midway en route between New York City and Detroit and linked the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, which brought an influx of new opportunities to the region and earning Buffalo the moniker of “the Queen City.” It also cites the 1901 Pan-American Exposition that placed Buffalo in the international eye. The chapter explains how Buffalo had become the butt of jokes in the opening monologues of late-night comedians by the 1970s after the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959 made the Erie Canal system obsolete for moving freight. It mentions that the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts provided funds for the expansion of the massive neoclassical Albright-Knox complex.

Introduction

This chapter provides a background of the complete portrait of the city of Buffalo, which moves beyond its relatively small city limits to tell the full story that the Erie Canal, hydroelectric power, international trade, and suburbanization play in the vicissitudes of Buffalo's history. It focuses on both Erie and Niagara counties from the eighteenth century to the present. It also describes Buffalo's periphery to provide useful insights into the full scope of how the grand City of Light, powered by Niagara's heaving currents and celebrated at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, had its own undercurrents and afterlives. The chapter mentions Reyner Banham, who brought a fresh set of foreign eyes to Buffalo's uncanny importance. It explores how Buffalo is indebted to Banham for cultivating a global interest and local reinvestment in its urban fabric.

We Walked

Jane Manning experienced the gift of tongues shortly after her conversion, an event she took as a confirmation of her decision to join the Mormons. The rest of the Manning family appears to have converted to Mormonism after her and, together with white converts from the area, they all left Connecticut for Nauvoo, Illinois, under the direction of LDS missionary Charles Wesley Wandell. The practice of racial segregation on boats and railways meant that for much, if not all, of their journey from Connecticut to New York City and then up the Hudson River and west on the Erie Canal, the black and white members of the group were separated from one another. At some point during the trip, the black members of the group were refused further passage, so the Mannings walked the rest of the way. Jane’s memory of this portion of the journey emphasized God’s providence. When they arrived in Nauvoo, they found a bustling city that was struggling to accommodate newly arrived converts, many of whom were poor and vulnerable to the diseases that plagued the city.