The Future City on the Inland Sea: A History of Imaginative Geographies of Lake Superior
Eric Olmanson has traced the frontier history of Lake Superior in a most unusual and creative way: as a series of past human imaginings of alternative future landscapes. Interpreted through the lens of this thought-provoking book, maps and topographic descriptoins become windows into human dreams, revealing imaginative geographies that eventually produced profound material changes in the regional landscape. Olmanson's findings have implications for American historical geography that reach far beyond the shores of the greatest of our Great Lakes. —William Cronon, author ofNature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great WestEric Olmanson's book demonstrates a new approach in regional geography, one that begins not with a region, which would be to start at the wrong end of the story,  but with a vaguely defined space that, through the perceptions and actions of individuals and institutions, expands, contracts, shifts in center of focus, until it finally acquires an identity firm enough and sufficiently distinctive to be called a region. Olmanson has given us a portrait of a place that is also an engaging and deeply human tale.—Yi-Fu Tuan, author ofSpace and Place: The Perspective of Experience