Just in time for the 200th anniversary commemorating the completion of this engineering marvel, Many Voices: Building Erie, the Canal that Changed America (Holiday House, August 2025) investigates the untold stories of men, women, and children from all social classes and national origins who helped create and work on the Erie Canal.
Award-winning author Laurie Lawlor’s full-color narrative nonfiction explores how this monumental, 363-mile canal was built across a daunting upstate New York landscape at a time when America had no trained engineers, no idea how to make water-proof concrete, no modern mechanical tools, and no reliable source of workers.
Many Voices takes a deep dive into how canal construction altered the environment and uprooted the Haudenosaunee from their long-standing homeland in New York.
Linking the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, the Erie Canal boosted the global economic status of New York City, expanded Westward settlement deep inside America’s farming heartland, and spiked growth in cities as varied as Chicago, Milwaukee, Toledo, Rochester, Duluth, and Toronto.
Just as today’s Internet has created a “superhighway” of purchasing possibilities and an array of political, social, cultural, and religious ideas from around the globe, the Erie Canal propelled nationwide trade and a network of new ideas — everything from abolition of slavery to promoting women’s right to vote .
Many Voices: Building Erie, the Canal that Changed America includes more than ninety photos, maps, and artwork, detailed timeline, suggestions for visiting today’s canal, complete bibliography, endnotes, and index. The book has been listed as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection.
Trained as a journalist at Northwestern University, Laurie Lawlor is a visiting lecturer in creative writing. She has created forty-three works of award-winning fiction and nonfiction for children, young adults, and adults. Environmental writing is her passion.
Restoring Prairie, Woods, and Pond How a Small Trail Can Make a Big Difference (Holiday House) received the Society of Midland Authors Honor for Nonfiction. Lawlor’s This Tender Place: the Story of a Wetland Year (University of Wisconsin Press), natural history/memoir, chronicles one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world.
Her work also explores the lives of remarkable women. What Music! The Fifty-year Friendship between Beethoven and Nannette Streicher, Who Built his Pianos; Rachel Carson and her Book that Changed the World, winner of the John Burroughs Riverby Award for Excellence in Nature Writing; and Fearless World Traveler, Adventures of Marianne North, Botanical Artist, which received the Junior Guild Gold Standard Selection.
Super Women: Six Scientists Who Changed the World profiles pioneers in fields ranging from astronomy to mathematics.
Learn more about Lawlor and her books here.
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