What Are We Doing Wrong?

Beginning as a review essay of Peter L. Bernstein's Wedding of the Waters, this brief piece asks why publishers continue to favor derivative books by journalists and popularizers while strangling the flow of capital into the genuine scholarship on which such glosses depend. In addition to Bernstein's account of the Erie Canal, Larson references various other works on American canals, steamboats, railroads, slavery, and Founding Fathers. At issue is the future of academic scholarship if the book publishers all abandon monographic studies and focus their energies and resources on the same narrow class of Barnes and Noble blockbusters. Where will original researchers find an outlet? Where will popularizers find grist for their mills?