SOON TO BE RELEASED!

by Jeff Z. Klein and Scott Alexander Wood

Once a teeming Great Lakes port famed for its ships and reviled for its dockside brothels and bars, Buffalo was the brawling crossroads of nineteenth-century America, a maritime city where the Erie Canal ended and the open water began, with a rich legacy of gales, songs, yarns, shipwrecks and lives saved and lost on the lakes’ treacherous, storm-tossed waters. Buffalo was a harbor town so big and infamous that it became a byword for the raucous nautical life of its itinerant sailors; Steelkilt, Melville’s swashbuckling mutineer in Moby-Dick, was a Buffalonian, and even the famous sea chantey “Blow Ye Winds,” which begins…

     Tis advertised in Boston, New York and Buffalo
     Five hundred brave Americans, a-whaling for to go  

…illustrates just how highly the Buffalo of the mid-1800s ranked in the roll call of America's port cities.

In Buffalo and across North America, all that has been forgotten. But Klein and Wood bring it all back to life in You Should've Seen Us Howling: The Lost Maritime History of a Great Lakes Port City, Buffalo. Their book tells the story of the port of Buffalo, from its beginnings in the 1700s to its end in the 1970s, through illustrations that animate every tragic shipwreck and harrowing rescue, every grizzled sailor and dockside prostitute, every gunshot and sea chantey, to which the city and its icy waters served as backdrop. And through the forgotten story of maritime Buffalo, we learn of another story: that of the Great Lakes, North America's vast inland sea. 

Now, we proudly present Chapter 1 of this exciting 10-chapter book, which will soon be available for purchase in its entirety. Stay tuned next month for Chapter 2!