Introduction

As a subject of study, Niagara Falls readily lends itself to interdisciplinary analysis. Many studies over the years have demonstrated this in depth and in breadth alike. In recent years alone, work by Canadian scholars such as Karen Dubinsky, Brian Osborne, Linda Revie, Rob Shields, to name just these, has greatly increased knowledge and appreciation of the phenomenon of the Falls—not to mention the tremendous contribution of Pierre Berton's hugely successful and popular Niagara: A History of the Falls (1992). The five essays on Niagara presented in this issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies remind readers that there remain many aspects of the Falls yet to be explored and discussed.

In their essays Terry McDonald and Ian K. Steele return to the beginnings of colonial history in Niagara. Steele investigates the fate of Canadian and French prisoners at Fort Niagara in 1759. The story of the Niagara prisoners provides a portal through which Steele details the complex relationships between white Europeans of different national allegiances and North American Aboriginal groups of different tribal affiliations, and between low- and high-ranked soldiers and colonists on both sides of the frontier. The surrender of Fort Niagara demonstrated as well the collision between European conventions of post-war—accord in this case the 1759 Franco-British accord on the treatment of prisoners-of-war signed at Sluis, the Netherlands—and new realities of North American practices of war. The experience of Fort Niagara's prisoners in 1760 illustrated a clearly North American way of handling captured personnel.

Half a century later, Niagara's importance within Britain's military defence strategy was altered. Terry McDonald discusses a shift in British defence focus away from frontier Niagara after the War of 1812. Notwithstanding its strategic frontier importance, British officials viewed Niagara as indefensible, "particularly where the river is narrow and comparatively shallow," McDonald explains. "The War of 1812 had revealed how easily the river could be crossed (both ways) and, given enough men, the forts taken." A different approach was developed, involving the construction of inland waterways or canals by which to move defence forces quickly to points under threat. The result was not only a newly peripheral place for Niagara in Britain's defence strategy of the time but also, Steele documents, the demise of Kingston as a military centre, despite valiant efforts on the part of the Dockyard's energetic Commodore Robert Barrie to proclaim and maintain its vital role. Britain saw inland rather than frontier fortification as the best way to defend its presence in Canada.

Turning from military to economic perspectives, Karl Froschauer traces the evolution of early private hydro development of Niagara Falls and the resulting delay in industrialization of Ontario's southwestern hinterland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when both American and Canadian power companies favoured exporting electricity to the US market. Froschauer examines how the Ontario power movement, together with the provincial and federal governments, reversed privatization through the gradual establishment of public electricity resources in Ontario. The story's relevance today is underscored by such recent power resource events as the August 2003 "blackout" in Ontario. "One hundred years after events at Niagara Falls and in keeping with the neo-liberal economic policies of governments in the 1990s," Froschauer warns, "hydroelectric resources are in danger of being privatized again." Public versus private control of utilities remains an issue in the Niagara story.

The cultural significance of Niagara Falls spans the full spectrum from high to low culture. The latter embraces the honeymoon motels, wax museums, curio shops, amusement parks, dare-devil, high-wire and other sideshows and casts of characters that comprise Niagara as a familiar tourist destination. The former is the Falls of such famous artistic representations as Frederic Edwin Church's (1857) painting The Great Fall, Niagara. In the literary domain, the Falls have attracted and inspired poets, novelists, dramatists, and other writers throughout the years, from Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to more recent Canadian examples such as Jane Urquhart, Suzette Mayr, Catherine Gildiner, and Brian Quirt. Film maker Kevin McMahon has considered the falls from yet another perspective and through a different mode of artistic expression in his National Film Board Production "The Fall."

In their article, "'Home Sweet Havoc': Howard Engel's Niagara in Print and Film," Marilyn Rose and Jeannette Sloniowski examine the detective novelist's engagement with the Niagara region as a socio-historical nexus that is "more than a physical setting dominated by the beauty and awesome power of the Falls themselves." Rose and Sloniowski find that class differences operative in Engel's detective stories reflect social realities in the Niagara region. The observation serves as a reminder of Niagara's industrial and working-class past. Renowned for its fruit lands and vineyards, the Niagara region became equally well known for its "Love Canal," longtime dump site for the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation and other companies along the American side of the waters. Today, the Love Canal story boggles the imagination about how the natural beauty and flow of Niagara was turned into a channel of health-threatening waste. While the threat has diminished with enforced clean-up, concerns remain, underscoring the need to imagine a more positive future for the Niagara region. This is Robert Shibley and Lynda Schneekloth's urging in their contribution to the Journal's Commentary section. Through the project "Rethinking Niagara," Shibley and Schneekloth envision alternative futures for Niagara, including the development of a multinational strategy to protect and promote sites of global significance in the region and the creation of a bi-national regional plan. Both projects, Shibley and Schneekloth state, "will require significant research from multiple disciplines that do not constrain their interests according to geopolitical borders."

Interdisciplinary research and international cooperation are key elements in the ongoing study of Niagara Falls. A wide variety of fascinating topics about Niagara remains for analysis. The handful of essays presented in this issue take a step in that direction.