Many of the world’s major cities sprang up on the banks of rivers. Used for water, food, irrigation, transportation, and power, rivers sustain life and connect the world together, but most of us think of them simply as waterways that must be crossed on the way to another place. Using four European and two North American rivers as examples, A Story of Six Rivers considers the place of rivers in our world and emphasizes the inextricable links between history, culture, and ecology. Peter Coates explores six rivers, chosen as examples of the types of rivers found on the planet: the Danube, the second-longest river in Europe; the Spree, which flows through Berlin; the Po, which cuts eastward across northern Italy; the Mersey in northwest England; the Yukon, which runs through Canada and Alaska; and the Los Angeles in California. Creating a series of river biographies, Coates gives voice to each of these bodies of water, exploring how rivers nurture us, provide cultural and economic opportunities, and pose threats to our everyday lives. He challenges recent narratives that paint rivers as the victims of abuse, pollution, and damage at the hands of humans, focusing on change rather than devastation. Describing how humans and rivers form a symbiotic—and sometimes mutually destructive—relationship, Coates argues that rivers illustrate the limits of human authority and that their capacity to inspire us is as strong as our ability to pollute them. An intimate portrait of the way these bodies of water inform our lives, A Story of Six Rivers will make us reconsider the streams and tributaries we traverse each day.

Water control and management have been fundamental to the building of human civilisation. In Europe, the regulation of major rivers, the digging of canals and the wetland reclamation schemes from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, generated new typologies of waterscapes with significant implications for the people who resided within them. This book explores the role of waterways as a form of heritage, culture and sense of place and the potential of this to underpin the development of cultural tourism. With a multidisciplinary approach across the social sciences and humanities, chapters explore how the control and management of water flows are among some of the most significant human activities to transform the natural environment. Based upon a wealth and breadth of European case studies, the book uncovers the complex relationships we have with waterways, the ways that they have been represented over recent centuries and the ways in which they continue to be redefined in different cultural contexts. Contributions recognise not only valuable assets of hydrology that are at the core of landscape management, but also more intangible aspects that matter to people, such as their familiarity, affecting what is understood as the fluvial sense of place. This highly original collection will be of interest to those working in cultural tourism, cultural geography, heritage studies, cultural history, landscape studies and leisure studies.

Rivers figure prominently in a nation’s historical memory, and the Volga and Mississippi have special importance in Russian and American cultures. Beginning in the pre-modern world, both rivers served as critical trade routes connecting cultures in an extensive exchange network, while also sustaining populations through their surrounding wetlands and bottomlands. In modern times, “Mother Volga” and the “Father of Waters” became integral parts of national identity, contributing to a sense of Russian and American exceptionalism. Furthermore, both rivers were drafted into service as the means to modernize the nation-state through hydropower and navigation. Despite being forced into submission for modern-day hydrological regimes, the Volga and Mississippi Rivers persist in the collective memory and continue to offer solace, recreation, and sustenance. Through their histories we derive a more nuanced view of human interaction with the environment, which adds another lens to our understanding of the past.

Rivers in Russian Literature focuses on the Russian literary and folkloric treatment of five rivers—the Dnieper, Volga, Neva, Don, and Angara. Each chapter traces, within a geographical and historical context, the evolution of the literary representation of one river. Imagination may endow a river with aesthetic or spiritual qualities; ethnic, national, or racial associations; or commercial or agricultural symbolism of many kinds. Russian literary responses to these five rivers have much to tell us about the society that produced them as well as the rivers they treat. Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

This book follows the historical trajectory of African Americans and their relationship with the Mississippi River dating back to the 1700s and ending with Hurricane Katrina and the still-contested Delta landscape. Long touted in literary and historical works, the Mississippi River remains an iconic presence in the American landscape. Whether referred to as "Old Man River" or the "Big Muddy," the Mississippi River represents imageries ranging from the pastoral and Acadian to turbulent and unpredictable. However, these imageries—revealed through the cultural production of artists, writers, poets, musicians, and even filmmakers—did not reflect the experiences of everyone living and working along the river. Missing is a broader discourse of the African American community and the Mississippi River. Through the experiences of African Americans with the Mississippi River, which included narratives of labor (free and enslaved), refuge, floods, and migration, a different history of the river and its environs emerges. The book brings multiple perspectives together to explore this rich history of the Mississippi River through the intersection of race and class with the environment. The text will be of great interest to students and researchers in environmental humanities, including environmental justice studies, ethnic studies, and US and African American history.

This collection explores the intersections of oral history and environmental history. Oral history offers environmental historians the opportunity to understand the ways people’s perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments change over time. In turn, the insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active, more-than-human world shapes experiences and people. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour. It includes contributions from Australia, India, the UK, Canada and the USA.

This book explores the historical relationships between human communities and water. Bringing together for the first time key texts from across the literature, it discusses how the past has shaped our contemporary challenges with equitable access to clean and ample water supplies. The book is organized into chapters that explore thematic issues in water history, including “Water and Civilizations,” Water and Health,” “Water and Equity” and “Water and Sustainability”. Each chapter is introduced by a critical overview of the theme, followed by four primary and secondary readings that discuss critical nodes in the historical and contemporary development of each chapter theme. “Further readings” at the end of each chapter invite the reader to further explore the dynamics of each theme. The foundational premise of the book is that in order to comprehend the complexity of global water challenges, we need to understand the history of cultural forces that have shaped our water practices. These historical patterns shape the range of choices available to us as we formulate responses to water challenges. The book will be a valuable resource to all students interested in understanding the challenges of water use today.

In the beginning, there was the river — before the beach, before the drain, before the dredging, before the dams, before numerous other actions that altered the stream. River Dreams reveals the complex history of the Cooks River in south-eastern Sydney — a river renowned as Australia’s most altered and polluted. While nineteenth century developers called it ‘improvement’, the sugar mill, tanneries, and factories that lined the banks of Sydney's Cooks River had drastic consequences for the health of the river. Local Aboriginal people became fringe dwellers, and over time the river became severely compromised, with many ecosystems damaged or destroyed. Later, a large section was turned into a concrete canal, and in the late 1940s the river was rerouted for the expansion of Sydney Airport. While much of the river has been rehabilitated in recent decades by passionate local groups and through government initiatives, it continues to be a source of controversy with rapid apartment development placing new stresses on the region. River Dreams is a timely reminder of the need to tread cautiously in seeking to dominate, or ignore, our environment. A beautiful book that reminds us that Australians are river people as much as we are bush or coast dwellers.’ — IAN HOSKINS