Narrating the history of Michigan's forest industry, Karamanski provides a dynamic study of an important part of the Upper Peninsula's economy.

“This thoroughly referenced book reveals the importance of the development of forest resources to Canadian social and economic existence. Rather than presenting just a compilation of facts and figures, the authors synthesize the information to make interesting observations. History is revealed as a series of interactive movements by various industrial, social, and political groups. ... Highly recommended for college and university collections that include forest history, forest policy, Canadian history, and conservation history.”–Choice “Lost Initiatives surveys Canadian forestry policy since the early nineteenth century, and particularly between the second American Forestry Congress, held in Montreal in 1882, and 1939. The authors achieve a Canada-wide perspective by including separate chapters on New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia, and offering an extensive account of federal forestry policy. The latter, which derives from archival research, is the most original of the book's contributions. . . Indeed, the book has considerable relevance to those interested in the development of professions in Canada. . . the book can be warmly recommended as a well-documented, genuinely national study that provides numerous points of departure and of context, whether for a comprehensive history of Canadian forests and forest policy or for analyses of parts of a very large subject. And the eloquent concluding chapter, on the last forty years of forest policy, could well serve as a call to arms even for those not persuaded that the previous chapters tell the real story of how we got here.”–The Canadian Historical Review

The St. Croix River, the free-flowing boundary between Wisconsin and Minnesota, is a federally protected National Scenic Riverway. The area’s first recorded human inhabitants were the Dakota Indians, whose lands were transformed by fur trade empires and the loggers who called it the “river of pine.” A patchwork of farms, cultivated by immigrants from many countries, followed the cutover forests. Today, the St. Croix River Valley is a tourist haven in the land of sky-blue waters and a peaceful escape for residents of the bustling Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan region. North Woods River is a thoughtful biography of the river over the course of more than three hundred years. Eileen McMahon and Theodore Karamanski track the river’s social and environmental transformation as newcomers changed the river basin and, in turn, were changed by it. The history of the St. Croix revealed here offers larger lessons about the future management of beautiful and fragile wild waters.