Freshwater Fury

Life and Death on the Great Lakes

Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi

A hidden history of the Great Lakes that is as vast and deep as the waters themselves.

Great Lakes, sweet waters, inland seas. Whatever you call them — there is nothing in the world like them. They are deep, wide, and so forceful they can sink a freighter during a squall. Hurricanes-like storms have torn through them. Meteotsunamis have created giant tidal waves that have ripped across the water, hit one shoreline, and then raced to pound the other.

The Great Lakes are beautiful, but they are brutal. People forget, but the shorelines have served as cemeteries, open-air morgues, and remote prisons. The lakes have also been profound secret keepers. They have been used as expansive highways for smugglers and pirates. They operated as routes on the Underground Railway when enslaved people escaped to freedom.

To tell these hidden histories requires a compilation — a collection of distinct stories about life on the lakeshores that also asks, why did the collective memory forget? Why have epic stories become hidden histories? Freshwater Fury brings these hidden histories to the surface. And like the lakes themselves, these stories are deep, they are vast, and they are unlike anything else in the world.

Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, PhD is an author, journalist, and educator. She is a regular contributor to Discover Magazine and she has contributed to National Geographic and The Atlantic. Her work has also appeared in country’s largest newspapers including The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. She is the author of four non-fiction books and holds a PhD from the University of Illinois-Chicago. She lives in the Chicago area with her husband and two little dogs.

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