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200 Years of ‘Celebration of the Grand Canal’

The opening day celebration of the Erie Canal in 1825 was a momentous occasion, featuring parades as well as crowds of people gathering to witness the first ships sail through the canal. One such witness was the Reverent Charles Giles. Giles arrived in Western New York from Connecticut, and eventually settled outside Utica after more than a dozen years of preaching around the state. A part-time poet, Giles wrote “Celebration of a Grand Canal” as a tribute both to the monumental construction as well as a salute to then Governor Clinton for his role in the project. “Celebration of the…

A journey through New York waterways with ‘Canal Boatman’

Richard Garrity spent much of his youth on the Erie Canal, with plenty of happy memories both along the waterways and on tugs and boats along the river. Garrity would go on to work as a boatmen as a young man, recording his memories years later in Canal Boatman: My Life on Upstate Waterways. In the below excerpt, Garrity remembers his first journey along the newly opened, expanded Barge Canal, which offered a new peak at familiar waters for the experienced boatman. When the Barge Canal opened on May 15, 1918, I had hired out as a fireman on the…

Books for Understanding: Immigration

Across our many published series, Syracuse University Press has explored issues regarding immigration through a number of lenses, and in a wide variety of regions, never losing sight of the individuals caught up in the complex, often Byzantine process. Explore some of those titles below. In Nepali Migrant Women, Hamal Gurung gives voice to the growing number of Nepali women who migrate to the United States to work in the informal economy. Highlighting the experiences of thirty-five women, mostly college educated and middle class, who take on domestic service and unskilled labor jobs, Hamal Gurung challenges conventional portraits of Third…

Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day

For Indigenous Peoples Day, we’re celebrating the work of poet and member of Haudenosaunee tribe Eric Gansworth, whose book, A Half-Life of Cardi-Pulmonary Function charts the tensions of those struggling against the norms of the dominant culture with humor, heart and image-laden lines. Below are excerpts from A Half-Life of Cardi-Pulmonary Function, including some of the art pieces from the book. The Way Howdy Reveals In this poem you would thinkHowdy was a greeting, likeSomething from those old westernsWhere the Indians are defeatedAgain and again, no matterHow many of them there areAnd how many arrows they have but you would…

Excerpt: Mad Scholars

The following is an excerpt from Mad Scholars: Reclaiming and Reimagining the Neurodiverse Academy, edited by Melanie Jones and Shayda Kafai and published by Syracuse University Press, Copyright 2024 by Syracuse University Press. The excerpt is drawn from the introduction, written by the editors. This collection explores how our Mad selfhood is understood, articulated, and engaged through our capacity as scholars. It wonders where we might go if we embraced that overlap instead of shunning it: if we probed its depths and exploded its boundaries.” From the start, Mad Scholars has emerged from a place of hopeful, desperate imagining. What…