Rivers in History: Perspectives on Waterways in Europe and North America (review)

Rivers, like river anthologies, wander and braid. Deep in places and shallow in others, they drain every kind of landscape, and history books about rivers are likewise all over the map. Editors do what they can to keep them flowing in one direction. Rivers in History features twelve rivers on two continents. Topics include transportation, industrial pollution, hydro development, environmentalism, photography, and tourism. With nine very good but very different essays, editors Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller struggle to keep the torrent contained.

The volume begins with an overstatement. "Rivers," say Mauch and Zeller, "have typically been treated as a neutral setting . . . as merely the backdrop against which human history had unfolded" (p. 2). But river histories range from reclamation to steamboats, from the Merrimack mills to the Johnstown Flood. Historians have personified, even deified, rivers—placing them front and center, stressing the power of water in motion as benefactor and beast, as pathways of empire, as organic machines, as Leo-pold von Ranke's metaphor for "history" itself.

David Blackbourn makes this point in the volume's opening study. In the German tradition, says Blackbourn, each generation has rediscovered rivers—each through the distorted lens of cultural expectations, each through mythic thinking forever shifting with time. Germans write about rivers because they freight historical legend, because they showcase human ingenuity, and also because rivers invite humans to think about other species. "Germans constructed a new set of meanings for their rivers as they remade them," Blackbourn concludes (p. 23).

Subsequent authors take a more focused approach. Case studies of Paris and Pittsburgh follow urban rivers through three parallel historical stages: a preindustrial stage when rivers were public commons; an industrial stage when rivers were toxic freightways; and a restoration stage when rivers were highly valued as playgrounds and nature preserves. During the industrial stage, writes Isabelle Backouche, the Seine became "estranged" from the everyday life of Paris. Dikes and dams impounded the river for shipping. Engineers built stately bridges and walled the Seine with museums. Likewise in Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny meets the Monongahela, forming the Ohio, the age of industry made a sewer out of a commons. Not until the 1980s did the real estate market begin to rethink industrial uses. Greenway waterfronts have since reconnected rivers to the life of the city on both the Ohio and the Seine.

Other contributors to the book stress the overriding power of technocratic bureaucracy. Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted, in her comparison of the Volga and the Mississippi, shows the transatlantic drift toward bigger-is-better "high modernist" architecture. Massive and monumental, the engineering overpowered political ideology. In Alpine France, meanwhile, technocratic control predated industrialization. On the Isère, writes Jacky Girel, the hydraulics of channelization was a far-reaching tool of the nation-state. Big government as an agent of change also had limitations. Charles E. Clossman compares the localism of England's Yorkshire to Prussian control of the Ruhr. Heavy industrial polluters easily coopted Prussia. Decentralized pollution control in England did more for public health.

The anthology closes with solid research about rivers resuscitated. Thomas Lekan follows the progress of Germany's Rhine from a poisonous "river of Hell" to "the cleanest river in Europe." Ute Hasenšhrl portrays the Bavarian Lech as river torn between mass tourism and green tourism, between boating reservoirs and nature preserves. Recreation also transformed the public perception of nature in Steven Hoelscher's study of tourism and photography along the Wisconsin Dells. Environmental concern for rivers as natural systems long predated the era of Earth Day on the Wisconsin, the Rhine, and the Lech.

Rivers in History has no explicit conclusion. Collectively, however, the authors show that river engineering transcends the ideologies of nations. More than metaphor, more than plumbing, rivers pervade historical writing because they connect the story of civilization to the dynamics of the natural world.