Many Voices: Building the Erie Canal, by Laurie Lawlor (Holiday House, 2025)
Review by New York Almanack Editorial Staff
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 aJunior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection.
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