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When Horses Walked on Water: Horse-Powered Ferries in Nineteenth-Century America. By Kevin J. Crisman and Arthur B. Cohn. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. xviii, 292 pp. $37.50, ISBN 1-56098-843-6.)
In 1983, an underwater survey of Lake Champlain revealed a mysterious artifact: a century-old boat with a pair of paddle wheels but no engine. Among those recognizing that horses provided the boat's motive power, authors Kevin J. Crisman (a nautical archaeologist) and Arthur B. Cohn (a museum director) spent the next several years cataloging the wreck and researching the career of horse-powered ferries in the antebellum United States. The resulting book, the subject's only extant scholarly treatment, is a valuable addition to the fields of historical archaeology, the history of technology, and nineteenth-century American social history.
Readers interested in the integration of historical...