Why has the American South--a place with abundant rainfall--become embroiled in intrastate wars over water? Why did unpredictable flooding come to characterize southern waterways, and how did a region that seemed so rich in this all-important resource become derailed by drought and the regional squabbling that has tormented the arid American West? To answer these questions, policy expert and historian Christopher Manganiello moves beyond the well-known accounts of flooding in the Mississippi Valley and irrigation in the West to reveal the contested history of southern water. From the New South to the Sun Belt eras, private corporations, public utilities, and political actors made a region-defining trade-off: The South would have cheap energy, but it would be accompanied by persistent water insecurity. Manganiello's compelling environmental history recounts stories of the people and institutions that shaped this exchange and reveals how the use of water and power in the South has been challenged by competition, customers, constituents, and above all, nature itself.

Water, an essential resource in all cultures, is at the heart of human power structures. Utilizing a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, the contributors to Water and Power in Past Societies provide a broad introduction to the archaeology of water-related power structures. The studies herein explore the long history of water politics in human society, offering new insights into the power structures and inequalities surrounding irrigation systems, the collection of rainwater as a component of ancient industrial production, and sea water as a facilitator of communication, trade, and aggression. In addition to examining the role of different types of water in creating power relationships, the volume presents case studies from a variety of climatic regions, ranging from the very dry to the tropical. This geographical breadth facilitates cross-cultural comparison, making Water and Power in Past Societies an essential resource for instructors and students of the archaeology of water. Finally, in addition to reaching conclusions with significant implications for archaeologists and anthropologists, the volume has real contemporary relevance, often drawing explicit parallels with issues of current and future water management.

For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses in search of cheap labor and almost no oversight. Imperial Food Products was one of those businesses. The company set up shop in Hamlet in the 1980s. Workers who complained about low pay and hazardous working conditions at the plant were silenced or fired. But jobs were scarce in town, so workers kept coming back, and the company continued to operate with impunity. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the never-inspected chicken-processing plant a stone's throw from Hamlet's city hall burst into flames. Twenty-five people perished that day behind the plant's locked and bolted doors. It remains one of the deadliest accidents ever in the history of the modern American food industry. Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past in the United States. However, as award-winning historian Bryant Simon shows, the pursuit of cheap food merged with economic decline in small towns across the South and the nation to devalue laborers and create perilous working conditions. The Hamlet fire and its aftermath reveal the social costs of antiunionism, lax regulations, and ongoing racial discrimination. Using oral histories, contemporary news coverage, and state records, Simon has constructed a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that exposes how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was destined to result in tragedy.

Regenerating Dixie is the first book that traces the electrification of the US South from the 1880s to the 1970s. It emphasizes that electricity was not solely the result of technological innovation or federal intervention. Instead, it was a multifaceted process that influenced, and was influenced by, environmental alterations, political machinations, business practices, and social matters. Although it generally hewed to national and global patterns, southern electrification charted a distinctive and instructive path and, despite orthodoxies to the contrary, stood at the cutting edge of electrification from the late 1800s onward. Its story speaks to the ways southern experiences with electrification reflected and influenced larger American models of energy development. Inasmuch as the South has something to teach us about the history of American electrification, electrification also reveals things about the South’s past. The electric industry was no mere accessory to the “New South” agenda—the ongoing project of rehabilitating Dixie after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Electricity powered industrialism, consumerism, urban growth, and war. It moved people across town, changed land- and waterscapes, stoked racial conflict, sparked political fights, and lit homes and farms. Electricity underwrote people’s daily lives across a century of southern history. But it was not simply imposed on the South. In fact, one Regenerating Dixie’s central lessons is that people have always mattered in energy history. The story of southern electrification is part of the broader struggle for democracy in the American past and includes a range of expected and unexpected actors and events. It also offers insights into our current predicaments with matters of energy and sustainability.

The New York Times bestseller A Long Walk to Water begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about two eleven-year-olds in Sudan, a girl in 2008 and a boy in 1985. The girl, Nya, is fetching water from a pond that is two hours' walk from her home: she makes two trips to the pond every day. The boy, Salva, becomes one of the "lost boys" of Sudan, refugees who cover the African continent on foot as they search for their families and for a safe place to stay. Enduring every hardship from loneliness to attack by armed rebels to contact with killer lions and crocodiles, Salva is a survivor, and his story goes on to intersect with Nya's in an astonishing and moving way.

"In Southern Rivers: Restoring America's Freshwater Biodiversity, R. Scot Duncan explores the environmental history and future of the rivers of the southeastern United States. These river systems are the epicenter of North American freshwater biodiversity and the top global hotspot for several aquatic taxa including mussels, turtles, snails, crayfish, and temperate zone fish; these rivers also play a prominent role in the region's history, culture, and economy. Unfortunately, centuries of industrialization have impaired the region's river systems, sacrificing biodiversity and compromising their ability to provide essential ecosystem services like drinking water, waste disposal, irrigation, navigation, and power production to human communities. And now overall waterflow is diminishing in the Southeast due to increasing heat and drought brought by climate change. As these and other threats to the region's water supply increase, it may seem necessary to prioritize between using water for natural resource conservation or reserving it for human concerns-but Duncan argues this is a false choice. Combining nature, science, and stories in a series of short, illustrated chapters, Southern Rivers takes readers on an illuminating journey of the Southeast's river systems and the many communities that depend on them. Duncan cogently articulates the challenges threatening rivers, streams, and wetlands in the face of the planet's accelerating climate and extinction crises, then turns to explore the new solutions conservationists and water managers have developed to preserve them. Ultimately, the book is both a call to action and a clear, comprehensive, practical plan to help the Southeast save its water resources and adapt to climate change by restoring the very biodiversity that is now under threat"--

Using the lens of environmental history, William D. Bryan provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the post-Civil War South by framing the New South as a struggle over environmental stewardship. Ultimately, he uses lessons from the New South to reflect on the path of American conservation and notions of sustainability today.

It is not the purpose of this work to propose a specific format for the settlement of the city's current difficulties with the valley, to resolve the environmental questions associated with Los Angeles's proposed groundwater pumping program, or to promote any cause associated with the developing situation in the Owens Valley. But by performing the essential historical task of separating what happened from what did not, and by distinguishing in this way the choices which have been made from those which have yet to be decided, it is my hope that this effort will help to establish that common basis for understanding which is essential for the debate over specific issues to proceed most effectively. This book, then, is scarcely the last word on the Owens Valley conflict: the final chapter, after all, has yet to be written. The story that has emerged here is at once very different and more troubling than the conventional treatments of the conflict as a simplistic political morality play. Any attempt to deal with so controversial a subject, however, is almost certain to spark controversy itself. For that reason, with the exception of a small collection of private letters, this work is constructed entirely from the published documents and other materials available to the general public, anchoring the narrative in sources the reader can consult to trace the line of my argument on any point with which he or she may disagree. In addition, the work as a whole has been reviewed for technical accuracy by officials of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, although the department is in no way responsible for the content of this study or the conclusions drawn from it.