Source: How Rivers Made America & America Remade Its Rivers

Martin Doyle

ISBN 10: 0393242358 / ISBN 13: 9780393242355

Published by W.W. Norton & Company, USA, 2018

About this Item

1st EDITION & 1st PRINTING. This copy is NEW; the text is clear, bright, and unmarked; binding is tight. The jacket is also new: absolutely intact , including excellent color and design. We have a five star rating because of our fulfilment success and because our descriptions are accurate. On foreign sales, because of the heavy weight of this book, we have to charge extra for shipping: however, we will only charge the difference between our regular shipping rate and the extra charge that the U.S.Post Office asks to ship the book. We guarantee: NO NASTY SURPRISES.

Seller Inventory # 770394

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Source: How Rivers Made America & America Remade Its Rivers
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, USA
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393242358
• ISBN 13: 9780393242355
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

An Amazon Best Book of the Year

How rivers have shaped American politics, economics, and society from the beginnings of the Republic to today.

America has more than 250,000 rivers, coursing over more than 3 million miles, connecting the disparate regions of the United States. On a map they can look like the veins, arteries, and capillaries of a continent-wide circulatory system, and in a way they are. Over the course of this nation’s history rivers have served as integral trade routes, borders, passageways, sewers, and sinks. Over the years, based on our shifting needs and values, we have harnessed their power with waterwheels and dams, straightened them for ships, drained them with irrigation canals, set them on fire, and even attempted to restore them.

In this fresh and powerful work of environmental history, Martin Doyle tells the epic story of America and its rivers, from the U.S. Constitution’s roots in interstate river navigation, the origins of the Army Corps of Engineers, the discovery of gold in 1848, and the construction of the Hoover Dam and the TVA during the New Deal, to the failure of the levees in Hurricane Katrina and the water wars in the west. Along the way, he explores how rivers have often been the source of arguments at the heart of the American experiment―over federalism, sovereignty and property rights, taxation, regulation, conservation, and development.

Through his encounters with experts all over the country―a Mississippi River tugboat captain, an Erie Canal lock operator, a dendrochronologist who can predict the future based on the story trees tell about the past, a western rancher fighting for water rights―Doyle reveals the central role rivers have played in American history―and how vital they are to its future.

20 illustrations

About the Author

Martin Doyle is director of the Water Policy Program at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and a professor of river science and policy at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He lives in North Carolina.