Product Description
In this fresh and powerful work of environmental history, Martin Doyle explores how rivers have often been the source of arguments at the heart of the American experiment―over federalism, taxation, regulation, conservation, and development.
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 through encounters with experts all over the country―a Mississippi River tugboat captain, an Erie Canal lock operator, a western rancher fighting for water rights―Doyle reveals how we've dammed, raised, rerouted, channelized, and even 're-meandered" our rivers.
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 through encounters with experts all over the country―a Mississippi River tugboat captain, an Erie Canal lock operator, a western rancher fighting for water rights―Doyle reveals how we've dammed, raised, rerouted, channelized, and even 're-meandered" our rivers.
Reviews/Praise
“The Source is one of those rare books you look up from and see with fresh eyes. Martin Doyle takes us on an epic national and historical river trip to remind us that America’s watercourses are one of our original entry points to the continent, that we are by now engaged with them in an almost bewildering litany of ways, and that we should never get so wrapped around modern life that we forget this truth: we are still river rats.” —Dan Flores, author of Coyote America