Profs and Pints Online presents: “How We Tamed the Great Lakes,” with Theodore Karamanski, professor of history and public history at Loyola University Chicago and author of several histories of the lakes’ exploration, navigation, commerce, and infrastructure.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given her for tickets and access.]

“There is a quiet horror about the Great Lakes which grows as one revisits them,” wrote Rudyard Kipling while taking passage on a lake steamer. “Fresh water has no right or call to dip over the horizon, pulling down and pushing up the hulls of big steamers…like a fully accredited ocean--a hideous thing to find in the heart of a continent.”

Kipling was by no means alone in his impression, even though--fortunately for the region’s tourist industry—most visitors have found the lakes more enjoyable than hideous. The lakes’ 94,000 square files of water are enough to have made them both major avenues of travel and obstacles to overcome, means of international commerce and sites of international battles, sources of tremendous nourishment and takers of untold numbers of lives.

Learn about the lakes’ history and their historical importance to our nation in this fascinating talk by Theodore Karamanski, an engaging public historian and prolific author whose books tackling the subject include Mastering the Inland Seas, Deep Woods Frontier, Blackbird’s Song and Civil War Chicago.

He’ll discuss the process by which a watery wilderness was harnessed to help build a nation—a story of ingenuity, political pigheadedness, and tragedy.

You’ll learn how, early in our nation’s history, the pivotal War of 1812 was largely a conflict for control of the Great Lakes region. Without the United States’ victory in the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie, the entire development of the Midwest would have been different.

You’ll also learn how the Great Lakes played a pivotal role in the sectional struggle between North and South. The construction of its harbors and lighthouses long faced tremendous opposition from southern Congressmen who opposed spending federal dollars to help the North grow, despite meaning the difference between life and death for those who sailed its waters.

Only after Union victory did the region develop into the nation's industrial heartland as industrial titans Eber Brock Ward, Andrew Carnegie and J.D. Rockefeller built the maritime-industrial complex that ensured America would become a world power. Great Lakes ports such as Chicago became among the busiest in the world, often surpassing the biggest ones on the East and West coasts in terms of the number of ships that docked at them each day.

Whether you live along lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, or Superior, like to visit them, or just have wondered about what is sometimes called our “third coast,” you’ll enjoy taking this plunge into history.

Profs & Pints Online: How We Tamed the Great Lakes