Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-02, Section: A, page: 0359.

Director: William J. Cronon.

This dissertation explores the ways in which the Erie Canal reshaped the everyday lives and attitudes of ordinary Americans. Part of the larger transportation revolution in antebellum America, the Canal played a major role in transforming the new nation's economy and geography, helping to set off the now more famous industrial and market revolutions. While the familiar story of the Erie Canal focuses on the waterway's economic impact on the Great West and the industrializing Northeast, this study concentrates instead on the region of Upstate New York through which the Canal passed. It focuses on social and cultural reactions to economic development in a region undergoing a rapid transition to a full-scale market economy. Because the Canal helped change some of the most intimate details of everyday life, New Yorkers regularly grappled with the new waterway's impact on their habits and values.

By examining men and women's perceptions of the ways in which the Erie Canal was changing their lives, this dissertation tries to capture their more general attitudes toward what people at the time labelled progress, or improvement. This story of the Erie Canal looks at the experiences of men, women, and children; tourists, farmers, merchants, businessmen, and workers; native-born Americans and immigrants. Because the Erie Canal stood as a prominent emblem of change, a variety of New Yorkers reflected consciously on the waterway's influence on their lives. When they did, they revealed much more than their attitudes toward the Canal itself. They also revealed their sentiments about some of the most important changes of the antebellum period generally: geographic mobility; rapid environmental change; a movement toward laissez-faire government; market expansion; and the reorganization of work. While many New Yorkers celebrated these signs of progress, they also mourned what they perceived as the passing of a simpler, more moral way of life. The Erie Canal thus provides a window on the ways in which New Yorkers responded to fundamental transformations that would sweep across much of the country during the course of the nineteenth century.