Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 113e136118

Coates begins with an interest in using stories of rivers tocombine history, culture, and ecology. His emphasis is clearly onthe first two topics and, as a historian, his research is thorough andinstructive. Coates often reaches into the areas of art and literatureto bring these landscape features to life. In each of the book’schapters, Coates demonstrates a remarkable flexibility as he utilizespaintings, sculpture, photography, and poetry as sources forrevealing a people’s relationship with a waterway.

Coates seeks to offer an alternative to what he calls the‘declensionist narrative of rivers’dthe straightforward account ofhuman dominion over nature in which people are shown to ‘calm,harness, rearrange and degrade rivers’ (p. 20e21). Coates wishes todemonstrate, rather, that ‘A river has a life and a life history in morethan just the scientific sense’. (p. 25). He does so by proposing anattention to the agency of rivers, most particularly their ability todisrupt and transgress the social world. Thought of as an agent ofchange, a river can, Coates notes, ‘provide its own emphatic answerto those who quibble that it cannot communicate in ways werecognize or leave a record’ (p. 26). In this sense, Coates tells us, ‘Aforce of nature is also a force of history’ (p. 26).

Coates’ argument is that ‘Even if we recoil from the formal grantof agency in a sense most historians will accept, rivers are, incon-trovertibly, a key determinant of historical events and processes’ (p.27). In shaping an approach he labels ‘liquid history’, Coates re-positions the river as a ‘leading participant, if not overwhelmingprotagonist’ of the book’s narrative (p. 28). Taking Mark Cioc’s TheRhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815e2000 (2002) as a partial inspiration,Coates thus offers a series of historical vignettes that seek toestablish each river’s centrality to human existence. With such apersuasive rationale, A Story of Six Rivers is sure to provide a tem-plate for telling histories of any global waterway. Indeed, the rela-tive randomness of Coates’ chosen quarries reinforces this point:there are no massive or expected stories here, only subtle ones ofdeep historical introspection.

Great or somewhat subtle waterways provide the only focus forCoates’ selections, which include the rivers Danube, Spree, Po,Mersey, Yukon, and Los Angeles. Although he might have done somore overtly and persuasively, the author’s range of rivers andplaces demonstrates a continuity in humans’ relationship to naturein both our living experiences and the stories that we tell. Therichest account might be that of the Danube, which constitutes thebook’s longest chapter.

Drawing from paintings, sculpture, engravings, and written ac-counts, Coates’ Danube is quite exhaustively recreated, withparticular care being taken to describe the hydro projects of themid-twentieth century. In a revealing example of his liquid historymodel, Coates’ chronology remains clear even though he allows hisprose to interweave these initiatives (which mirror the work of theTennessee Valley Authority) with efforts made to manage theDanube in earlier generations. His account thenwinds through filmand musical depictions of the river. As Coates concludes, ‘TheDanube is large enough to float the big themes of culture, memory,technology, war, home, politics, ecology, and the nature that thefilmmakers raise in its company’ (p. 82). Not every river carries sucha narrative capacity and some readers may ponder why the Danubewas not allowed to be the subject of the entire bookdin Coates’hands it certainly appears rich enough to be so.

In each river narrative, Coates traces a cultural story, oftenemerging fromvisual representations in art or photography or fromliterature. Interpretation of these sources, as well as the overallconception of the volume, is Coates’ greatest strength. The authortakes special care in the writing of each vignette to relate it to theother stories as well as to his overall concept of liquid history. Thestories rarely, however, get into the technical details and science or

hydrology of river geography. Instead, Coates’ approach isculturally-oriented in the vein of J. B. Jackson and others. Eachriver’s story represents an effectively researched and engaginglywritten application of how he would prefer all river history to betold. I think most readers will come away in agreement with him.

A Story of Six Riverswill interest general readers of writing aboutlandscape and particularly geographers, environmental historians,and professionals and scientists in the area of river managementwho are tangling with the human story of river use and manage-ment. Teeming with images that Coates deftly interprets, this bookshould garner genuine interest from any reader. The true insighthere, though, is an approach that others might followdthe creasecut in the river’s surface that is left behind after A Story of Six Riverspasses through.

Brian C. BlackPenn State Altoona, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.07.005

Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of theMississippi and Its Peoples, from Hernando de Soto to HurricaneKatrina. New York, Oxford University Press, 2012xii þ 300 pages,US$35 hardcover.

For centuries, writers have been trying to capture the MississippiRiver, from de Soto to Mark Twain to John Barry. Its roiling currentsand its arterial connection for continental commerce have made itshistory interwoven with America’s history. While much has beenwritten, and rewritten about the river, the Mississippi still providesample fodder for environmental history and historical geography.

Christopher Morris’s most recent contribution to the vast schol-arship of the Mississippi is important in its geographical and tem-poral angles. First, geographically, he focuses on the Mississippiriparian area. Many writers have focused their historical lens on theriver itself, yet Morris focuses on the lands at the edge of the river.While Big Muddy is often reserved for the even-more-sediment-laden Missouri River, Morris uses Big Muddy to capture the almostborderless nature of the Mississippi riparia, and the economies andcultures that have evolved in this morass of indistinctly intermixedregion of water and earth. By focusing on this strip of land, Morris isable to tease out how societies have adapted to living amidst un-certainty, andhowcarvingout that livinghas changedover centuries.

Morris second contribution is temporal through the unusualslices of time on which he focuses. These slices of time providecontext for much other work that focus almost exclusively on theriver during the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing over almostfive centuries, Morris begins by showing how Native Americanslived along the river by relying almost exclusively on mobility,simply relocating seasonally as the river would rise and fall, andadapted their diets to thefickleness of hydrology:floodsmight leavethem short on corn, but long on fish. It was this dynamic and diverselandscape of wet lands that was a draw to Native Americans, andeventually to European settlers.Morris’s chapter on rice unpacks thecritical role that this crop, often ignored in histories of the southcompared to cotton and tobacco, had in the initial decades of Eu-ropean settling of the southeastern United States; the expertiseinvolved, the struggles, and the landscape changes that werewrought in its wake. Perhaps most subtly is Morris’s deft researchand description of how levees changed the geography of farms, andthen plantations, and then the entire riverine society. Along large

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 113e136 119

rivers, sediment is deposited immediately adjacent to the channel,forming natural levees. This was the initial place for settling alongrivers, as it provided relative protection from floods and easy accessto the river for navigation. Initial settlers, like Native Americans,adjusted their geography to the hydrology of the river.

But the construction of levees in the early eighteenth centurymeant that homes had to be moved back from the slight rise alongthe river and into lower areas, which meant the levees had to behigher to protect the now-low-lying houses. Through detailedresearch, Morris reconstructs the cartography of an earlyeighteenth-century riverside property and the location of differentfields, ditches, levees and forests. This glimpse into the evolution ofriverfront agriculture begins to open the window into the greatalluvial pivot: rather than adjusting themselves to the river, settlersbegan adjusting the river itself. What followed was the era ofmassive levee-building and flood control efforts first by farmers,then by states, and then by the central character in any history ofthe Mississippi: the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Morris gives an ample, if cursory coverage of the Corps for goodreason: the histories of the Corps are impressive, and one cannotunderestimate the contribution of John Barry’s Rising Tide (1997) orMartin Reuss’s Designing the Bayous (1998). But Morris’s detailedwork before and after the rise of the Corps provides the context forthese other previous works. He lays the stage for the small eventsand decisions by the individual planters and communities that led,seemingly inevitably, to the vastness of the Corps, and the tech-nological hubris that in turn led to Katrina.

And here is where another slice of history provides a brilliantclosing context to the Big Muddy: catfish. For centuries, people hadlived in the wetness of the Mississippi valley, and lived with it andused it to agricultural advantage. The late nineteenth and most ofthe twentieth century was an era when every effort was made todry the landscape and live like the river didn’t exist. But toward theclose of the twentieth century, water was returned to the land toharvest catfish. As Morris notes, these ponds peppering the latetwentieth-century valley marked, in a way, a return to the NativeAmerican and early French model of working with the existingconditions; a coming full circle of life along the river.

ThroughoutTheBigMuddy,Morriswalks someof thewell-traveledstomping grounds of Mississippi River historians; he aptly walks thestreets and levees of New Orleans, the cotton fields, and the floodedLower NinthWard. But it is in hismeandering into the often forgottenswamps, oxbows, and decaying villages of the valley e focusing, forinstance, on Natchez, Mississippi instead of New Orleans, Louisianaethat Morris is able to reconstruct the landscape and the people.

The history of theMississippi valley is the story of a constant tug-of-war betweenwater and land.Morris has aptly told the stories thatare often on themargin of the river, and have been on themargin ofhistories of the valley. In doing this, he has provided much-neededcontexts for our endless fascination with the Mississippi River.

Martin W. DoyleDuke University, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.07.021

Tricia Cusack (Ed), Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge. Farnham,Ashgate, 2012, xiv þ 256 pages, £65 hardcover.

January 2014. It has hardly stopped raining for weeks. The news isdominated by the washed-out flood plains of the Somerset Levels,

where usually-tranquil village communities have returned tomarshland islands, echoing the swampy peatlands that existedbefore the draining of Sedgemoor in the seventeenth century: aconstant reminder that these now-submerged homes sit on landprecariously formed below sea level. I can only think how topicalthis book of essays, edited by Tricia Cusack, isdthere is so much todo in coming to terms with the challenges of living at, what seem tobe, increasingly precarious water’s edges.

Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge considers how visual arts’images of coastlines and rivers have functioned in the productionof social and political identities. It includes inter-disciplinaryresearch drawing on art history, critical theory, and culturalstudies and considers art forms ranging from mapping to film, andfrom historical periods that range from the ancient to thecontemporary. The introductory essay by Tricia Cusack sets aconcise and well-researched initial framing upon which the sub-sequent essays build. Cusack conceives of the water’s edge as amutable space between land and water that becomes investedwith different and often contested layers of cultural meaningsacross different periods and places. In its fluidity, the edge isresistant to any sense of fixed meaning, and becomes, therefore,open to a multitude of imaginaries that range from fertility todestruction; romantic awe and uninhabited void, to architecturalconstruction of the city water-line; from beach as zone ofencounter or gatherings of strangers, to beach as site of racial orsocial exclusions; coast as definition of nation state, to the liminalcoast or zone of otherness exemplified by the proximity of the farwest ‘Celtic fringe’ to the sea; from therapeutic escape, toheightened risk of being swept out to sea. Overall, Cusack paints apicture of the water’s edge as being not only environmentallyfluid but also fluid in its cultural imaginaryda constant state offlux that she holds to be universally significant in the making ofcultural and national identities.

These various themes are developed through the thirteen es-says divided between five themed sections. ‘Part I: The Nation atthe Edge’ considers the relationship between visual art forms(painting, architecture, and documentary film) and aspects ofnation building, in the contexts of Britain during the NapoleonicWars, the incorporation of the Baltic seaboard into the newly in-dependent Poland post 1918, and the socio-political exclusionsfound in documentary film of post-Hurricane-Katrina NewOrleans. The book’s second part, ‘Heritage by the Coast’, moves onto consider the heritage maritime environment: the developmentof maritime museums in Australia and the tendency ‘to de-historicize [the] past site of colonial encounters’ (p. 84), androles of lighthouses in Portugal as signifiers of the nation state,safe haven, and tourist site.

‘Part III: Conflicts of Identity at the Water’s Edge’ considers thecontested historical religious-cultural mapping of the River Jordan;the impact of modernist architecture along the banks of the RiverVltava in Prague in the creation of a Czech national identity; and aparticularly powerful discussion of the development of a separate‘African beach’ (p. 12) alongside the white resort in the Durbanbeachfront, in which Heather Hughes sources rare images thatdemonstrate the lack of visibility of the African beach in the visualrecord. ‘Regions of Liminality’, the book’s fourth section, covers thecultural imaging of three transitional zones along the water’s edge:the production of the French Riviera, positioned partway betweenEurope and the Orient; a beautifully nuanced essay by VickyGreenaway about the portrayal in the nineteenth century of theRiver Thames in the work of Whistler and Tissot as a liminal site atwhich the agency of the river-as-sea asserts its authority over thecity; and a consideration of the cultural-political significance asreflected in pre-1945 paintings of the Oder river, that runs through