It may be time to “de-territorialize historical narratives of the United States.” 1 As the premise of this special issue demonstrates, American history has long been told through a land-centered lens—one that treats water as a backdrop or boundary. Yet when we shift perspective to view the U.S. past through water or the shifting interface between land and water, familiar narratives transform. In some instances, literature and film have offered ways of reorienting our perceptions by giving water prominence over land as a driving force behind such narratives. Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction classic Dune does just that (Figure 1). He centers attention on the fictional desert planet, Arrakis, as the axis of his story. This choice seems to place aridity and desolation at the heart of the book. As the only source of the highly coveted “spice”—a substance that can “bend space” to make galactic travel possible—Arrakis becomes a battleground for interstellar warfare. Below the surface of the planet, figuratively and literally, the indigenous population of desert-savvy Fremen stores untold quantities of water, contrary to the popular view that Fremen society is weak because it is environmentally vulnerable without a sufficient water supply. However, the potential of their water to remake Arrakis is their hidden power, possibly more so than the presence of spice. 2
Histories of American water have tended to flow in two dimensions, tracing surface waters across horizontal space and only rarely descending into the earth below. Rivers, wetlands, dams, and canals have defined how we understand our relationship with this vital resource, and with the diverse human and more-than-human actors who share it. Foundational works by Donald Worster and Norris Hundley traced the rise of hydraulic societies in the American West, showing how rivers, dams, and aqueducts enabled both state formation and capitalist expansion, while Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi foregrounded water infrastructure in the field of urban environmental history. 1 More recent scholarship has explored cultural and social histories of water, including more-than-human perspectives, environmental justice, Indigenous water rights, and the political ecologies of urban and rural water systems, expanding the field well beyond its earlier focus on engineering and state-building. 2
Before the planters arrived, the Mississippi River Delta was a swampy jungle. In his 1941 memoir Lanterns on the Levee , William Alexander Percy, a prominent member of the regional plantation elite, described what the Delta might have looked like in those early days, with an emphasis on the area’s fluid nature. “A still country it must have been then, ankle-deep in water, mostly in shadow, with mere flickers of sunshine, and they motey and yellow and thick like syrup.” 1 But in the early nineteenth century, news had started to spread about the fertility of the Delta soil. The younger sons of plantation families in the eastern states, looking for new land to plant staple crops, began to move west, turning the Deep South of the United States into the vertex of the cotton frontier. In Mississippi they settled near the river, which provided transportation, information, and recreation, in the form of leisure trips to New Orleans. “The real highway was the river,” Percy wrote in his personal history of the Mississippi Delta. The steamer Pargo regularly arrived on Sunday mornings in the Delta town of Greenville. Most people would be in church then, but when the Pargo ’s whistle blew, the men immediately stood up from the pews and made for the riverfront, to hear the latest news and gossips. 2 Knowledge was an important cargo aboard riverboats like the Pargo . 3
In 1927, the city of Santa Barbara, California, began construction of a rubble mound breakwater to create a protected yacht harbor. The initial breakwater was an L-shaped structure that left a gap between the short “arm” of the breakwater and the shore, and engineers believed this configuration would allow sand to continue its normal movement along the coast. 1 The engineers who designed the structure acknowledged that, “The design of a harbor on a sandy coast is one of the most difficult problems of engineering.” They anticipated some shoaling of the harbor and erosion of the beach to the east, particularly during storms. 2 Their report framed the breakwater as an experiment in which trial-and-error would lead to an ideal harbor for the city, but they downplayed both risks and costs involved, including projecting that “the annual cost for maintenance will be negligible.” 3 This optimism would prove badly misguided, as sand almost immediately began to fill the new harbor.
Abstract The 1976 Bicentennial of American Independence was a watershed moment in the history of American memorialization and commemoration. Taking place against a backdrop of national decline and cultural fragmentation, the bicentennial produced several efforts to unite the nation’s hopes for the future in a celebration of its past. By centering the commemorative vision of Elizabeth Gentry Sayad, the indefatigable organizer of St. Louis’s Bicentennial Horizons of American Music (BHAM), this article examines an approach to the bicentennial that feted 1776, not in the hope of returning to a golden age in American history, but with the intention of synthesizing the sounds of the nation into a united forward-looking future. Dynamic and internationally oriented, Sayad’s leadership of BHAM adds regional texture to the national bicentennial story from an on-the-ground perspective. And it showcases an alternative, conservative multicultural path for engagement in historical commemoration in the late-twentieth-century United States.
This article examines the Peoples Bicentennial Commission (PBC), a New Left group founded in 1971 to provide an alternative to official celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution that culminated on July Fourth, 1976. The PBC has gone down in history mostly as a disappointment for having failed to halt the rise of the New Right. This study, though, takes a longer view of history to argue that the PBC, despite its faults, pursued a red, white, and blue brand of patriotic protest that worked to rekindle traditions of dissent that date from the early republic. By embracing America's revolutionary heritage and rediscovering forgotten practices, such as staging July Fourth protests and issuing alternative declarations of independence, the PBC helped not only to reinvigorate the left at a critical juncture in the 1970s but to model effective protest strategies moving forward.
This article examines planning for the United States Bicentennial in Washington, DC, focusing on the work of the DC Bicentennial Assembly in the early 1970s, as well as the Nixon administration's response. While the national bicentennial is often remembered through large federal celebrations on the National Mall, planning in the capital became a venue for local political engagement and advocacy. I show how Washington residents used bicentennial planning to articulate claims about representation, citizenship, and the city's political future, framing the anniversary as an opportunity to press for greater local control and a more meaningful realization of democratic ideals in the nation's capital. Federal officials, meanwhile, sought to channel commemorative activity into redevelopment efforts that targeted tourists and visitors, putting forth a different vision for the city. The resulting bifurcation, characterized by Nixon as a "civic schizophrenia," remains in the present day.
This article situates the 1976 United States Bicentennial as a critical juncture in the late-twentieth-century transformation and-borrowing from Daniel Rodgers-"thinning" of American understandings of society, state, and nationhood. It demonstrates how, amid economic crises and post-Watergate disillusionment, bicentennial commemorations provided key vehicles for reconfiguring more vernacular and granular conceptualizations of American identity and political economy. Repeatedly, discourses surrounding the bicentennial intertwined pro-enterprise ideals of producerism and economic self-determination with New Left idioms of personal empowerment, authenticity, and liberation. Following three interlinked case studies of bicentennial initiatives that sought to rehumanize American capitalism and restore its moral legitimacy, this article thus traces how less explicitly political commemorative discourses articulated, diffused, and naturalized soon-prevalent pro-market ideas. Ahead of the 2026 semiquincentennial, this article thus situates commemorative occasions not as political sideshows but as key formative moments in shaping Americans' understandings of society, state, and nationhood.
"The Bicentennial is one of the best ways to promote libertarian ideas." In the early 1970s, the nascent libertarian movement, spearheaded by the enigmatic ideologue Murray Rothbard, co-opted national celebrations of the United States Bicentennial to further their own political agenda. Devoted to the image of a "libertarian founding," activists engaged in the gleeful work of undoing mainstream historical narratives on the Left and Right, ultimately claiming the spirit of 1776 for themselves. This late-twentieth-century intellectual work has had long-term effects in American politics. This article introduces historians to the as of yet unexplored reclamation work done by the libertarian movement and then moves through its more recent echoes and contemporary resonances. It contributes to literatures on libertarianism, late-twentieth-century political development, and the history of the memory of the United States.
Following the end of the Great War in November 1918, fears of a nationwide crime wave spread through American newspapers. As East Coast and Midwestern cities struggled to suppress waves of crime, Los Angeles County appeared immune. But by fall 1919, Los Angeles (LA) County press and police officials admitted that the region was experiencing a wave. To break the wave, LA County police departments, especially in Los Angeles and Long Beach, expanded their officer pools, created new specialized squads, and embarked on arrest-heavy campaigns while city governments imposed strict curfews. Newspaper crime wave reporting provided the foundation for these expansions of police power, often in contradiction to reported crime statistics, and despite endemic police corruption.
Drawing on sensory, animal, environmental, and Japanese American history, this article explores Cat Island, Mississippi, site of a top-secret Army dog training program during the Second World War. Based on the theory that different races emitted distinct scents, the project attempted to train dogs to detect Japanese people, with the goal of deploying them in the Pacific theater. To develop the canine's olfactory skills, the Army used Japanese American soldiers as bait. The project failed because William Prestre, the project's director, sought a stable and immutable conception of race and the environment that did not exist. Military officials focused on the strategic value of the dogs and were circumspect about the existence of a racial odor, whereas Japanese American soldiers derived enjoyment from their activities along the Gulf Coast. Thus, constructions of race and environment were highly malleable, even during the short tenure of the Cat Island project.
This article identifies the centrality of the consumer to efforts to elicit civilian participation against rising crime in 1970s and 1980s New York City. From "best buy" reviews of anticrime products to the self-evaluation of home security arrangements and police services, these efforts championed individual responsibility, enterprise, and a vision of consumer citizenship, with safety secured via the acquisition of consumer goods or the assertion of consumer rights and rationality. Within a context of municipal austerity, diminished state legitimacy, and market-led restructuring, this vision proved popular and enduring, reorienting New Yorkers' responses to crime but also their understandings of self and community and their relationship with the state. Yet it also embedded inequalities and exclusions inherent to urban neoliberalism and contemporary cities. A focus on consumer citizenship reveals the popular dimensions of the neoliberal turn and its ongoing relevance to both urban governance and anticrime activity in today's New York City.
On August 7, 1942, Allied forces began their first offensive action against Japan on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Over the next few years, thousands of Solomon Islanders assisted Allied soldiers as construction workers, local scouts, and messengers. Based on oral histories and soldiers' memoirs, this article argues that these islander war workers not only played a crucial role in the ultimate Allied success in the Pacific war but were also part of a longer history of foreigners in the service of the U.S. empire. In fact, recruiting and managing non-combat workers of color became an important source of U.S. military and imperial power during World War II. Despite pervasive racism and demeaning work conditions, Solomon Islanders managed to create new opportunities both for themselves and for their home societies.
This article invites readers to examine water as an active force in U.S. history rather than a backdrop to national development. Complementing traditional historiographies and drawing on blue humanities, we reframe national narratives by linking the country's oceanic reach to domestic hydrology and imperial expansion, positioning the United States as a key driver and emblematic case of the "blue acceleration." A water-centered lens reveals how water availability and management extended state power, created sacrifice zones, fostered uneven development, and continue to test American democracy. The essay offers a conceptual map for reimagining the U.S. past and human-water relations in a warming world.
This article describes the nineteenth-century landscape of surface water distribution in cities of the U.S. West, focusing on its persistence after the advent of modern water mains, based on studies of San Antonio, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Phoenix, Arizona. These systems of ditches, acequias, zanjas, and canals began as the primary urban water supply, then later comprised a secondary system complementing the mains. Ditch networks shrank in the twentieth century, but this ostensibly obsolete waterscape survived for decades and in many places to the present. Ditches persisted because they continued to serve the purposes of their users, because sanitary reforms abated their former pollution, and because new categories of utility emerged in amenity, heritage, and ecosystem services. The study takes the perspective of users as well as providers and finds, in contrast to conventional stories of hydraulic modernity, a continuing example of "water plurality."
This photoarticle interrogates the notion that groundwater is an inherently democratic resource by examining the historical development of the Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S. Southern Plains. While aquifers are celebrated for their capacity to help reclaim new territories, the persistent overextraction of the Ogallala reveals a wider inability to sustainably govern this resource. Through a close analysis of photographs documenting the first efforts to mine the Ogallala, this essay explores how visual representations of groundwater extraction helped construct a racialized and gendered subjectivity centered on white male ownership and stewardship. These images, produced as part of speculative property schemes, framed groundwater as a tool for transforming both the material and social landscape. By tracing how this ideology took root, this essay argues that groundwater's seeming resistance to sustainable governance is not a product of its physical properties, but rather the outcome of historically constructed power relations and capitalist logics.
