Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime

by Elizabeth R. McKinsey

In this fascinating study, Beth McKinsey has chronicled the changing image of Niagara Falls, analysing the shifts in sensibility that produced different responses to the great cataract from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. She examines the evolving role of the Falls as the very meaning of the sublime moved away from its roots in eighteenth-century English aesthetics: from a natural, to a moral, to a technological basis. At the same time, the author describes the growing commercial trade.

347 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 1985