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Article: ERIE CANAL CHANGED LIVES IN ALBANY.(ENTERTAINMENT)
- Article from:
- Albany Times Union (Albany, NY)
- Article date:
- July 29, 1996
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Albany Times Union. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: PAUL GRONDAHL Staff writer
It may be stretching an analogy a bit, but historian Carol Sheriff likens the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 to the arrival of the electronic superhighway with the explosion of the Internet in the 1990s.
``What the Erie Canal did, and the Internet does, is compress our notion of distance,'' says Sheriff, author of the new book ``The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862'' (Hill and Wang, $21).
Such a radical rearranging of one's world view is accompanied by a period of doubt, debate and self-reflection. ``The same debate is going on today about whether the changes caused by ...