Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-ntvhh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-13T23:17:37.963Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Water’s History of the United States

Part of: The Soapbox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2026

Gaetano Di Tommaso Open the ORCID record for Gaetano Di Tommaso [Opens in a new window]  and
Dario Fazzi
Gaetano Di Tommaso*
Affiliation:
Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, Middelburg, Netherlands
Dario Fazzi
Affiliation:
Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, Middelburg, Netherlands Institute for History, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
*
Corresponding author: Gaetano Di Tommaso; Email: g.di.tommaso@roosevelt.nl
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Information

Type
The Soapbox
Information
Modern American History , Volume 9 , Special Issue 1: A Water’s History of the United States , March 2026 , pp. 1 - 17
Check for updates
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press

This short essay is an open invitation to reread and rewrite American history through blue-tinted lenses, that is, by placing water at the center of our narratives. Water has noticeably played an essential role in shaping the geography of the United States. From the Great Lakes in the north to the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico in the south, from the Potomac, Schuylkill, and Hudson Rivers to any of the 250,000 streams and waterways that cross the United States, and from its Arctic and Pacific archipelagos to the Atlantic seaboard, water both encompasses and comprises this country. Water has also been the force behind some of the United States’ most stunning natural and cultural landmarks, from the awe-inspiring Grand Canyon to the mighty Mississippi, where the fictional Huckleberry Finn embarked on his antebellum river journey. Water resources have been central to the growth of the United States as both a continental and a global power. Control over waterways, straits, and canals has played a key role in projecting U.S. influence abroad, as the country’s global ascendancy went through dominance over marine environments such as islands, archipelagos, and strategic chokepoints. Domestically, water issues have tested the limits of American democracy, too. From the 1919 race riots in Chicago—partly sparked by unequal access to swimming areas—to the ongoing struggle for clean water in Flint, Michigan, water has served as a site of conflict and a measure of institutional accountability. Why then, if all of this is well known, do we need a water’s history of the United States? We propose a threefold answer to this question.

First, a focus on how water resources have both shaped and been shaped by U.S. history complements conventional narratives that overlook aquatic environments, dynamics, and actors. For decades, land has dominated the country’s historical imagination and its myths of national growth. Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the country’s “free land” forged key national traits such as individualism, republicanism, and pragmatism. In 1938, Curtis Nettels claimed that the foundations of American civilization rested on the relentless pursuit of land.Footnote 1 Even recently, historians have emphasized, to varying degrees, that the control and conquest of land have been crucial in the building of U.S. federal institutions and power.Footnote 2 To be sure, in recent decades, environmental historians have skillfully shown how land and water are inseparable in the making of the United States.Footnote 3 Calls to integrate water-based sources and perspectives into national narratives have come from many corners, and the scholarship that has emerged in response has significantly expanded our understanding of how natural resources shaped American development.Footnote 4 These insights have also filtered into public history: the success of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s award-winning 2017 exhibition, People, Land, and Water, demonstrates how deeply these intertwined narratives have entered the nation’s self-representation.Footnote 5

Our proposal to re-center water in U.S. historical narratives values and draws on these efforts, while aiming to further expand and problematize them. A water’s history of the United States is indeed meant to bring such an environmental historiography into conversation with the rising field of the “blue humanities”—the study of the changing relationship between human cultures and organizations and water—and move toward a more critical history of the United States, one that is better attuned to oceans, rivers, and other water resources in a way that fully acknowledges the role that water has played in carving both American progress and its innermost contradictions and paradoxes. What distinguishes blue humanities approaches from the environmental history we build on is not merely a shift in subject matter—from forests and prairies to oceans and rivers—but a reorientation of method. Environmental historians have traced how water has been developed, allocated, and contested as a material resource and political object; blue humanities scholarship extends this work by attending to water’s cultural meanings, its embodied and sensory dimensions, and its entanglement with nonhuman life. Recent work in climate resilience thinking—such as Rob Verchick’s The Octopus in the Parking Garage, which begins with the story of an octopus stranded in a Miami Beach parking garage when a high tide, amplified by sea-level rise, reversed a storm drain—likewise exemplifies this turn toward understanding water as habitat and as a living system that continually reorganizes human and more-than-human possibilities. This perspective invites us to ask not only how Americans have controlled water, but also how water has oriented American ways of knowing, feeling, and imagining collective life.Footnote 6

Second, a water-based reading of the entirety of U.S. history aims to provide an overarching narrative that goes beyond regional or local case studies. There are, indeed, many excellent water histories of the United States.Footnote 7 Scholars have brilliantly explained how, in the West, for instance, the control of scarce water resources has become a defining instrument of settler colonialism.Footnote 8 Dams, diversions, and deals—most notably the 1922 Colorado River Compact—embedded what political geographer Andrew Curley calls a “colonial ontology”—one that treated water as the main engine of development and has sparked long-lasting conflicts between U.S. states and Indigenous nations over water rights.Footnote 9 Similarly, a series of recent works have offered fresh insights into how watery environments in the South offered spaces of mobility, refuge, and spiritual contiguity, while crucially enforcing social and racial control.Footnote 10

Invitations to unify these regional perspectives into a national one have been around for at least a couple of decades, yet the debate remains wide open, with new forums of discussion on this very issue continually emerging to this day.Footnote 11 One of the most ambitious efforts to craft a continent-wide narrative of water in North America remains Martin Melosi’s work, though his approach relies mainly on comparative case studies rather than on a single, overarching interpretive framework.Footnote 12 Mark Fiege, by contrast, offers a compelling account of the environment’s central place in U.S. history, yet water itself does not sit at the heart of his analysis.Footnote 13 We argue that attending to regionally distinct experiences reveals the underlying coherence of an exploitative national water regime, one that both relied on and ultimately justified the expansion of federal authority and the country’s broader influence. A history of the United States told through water can therefore illuminate the scale and reach of American power while highlighting ruptures, contradictions, and—pun unintended—unexpected watersheds in the nation’s past.

Third, a water’s history of the United States helps us to gauge the impact that the ascendancy of this country has had on the global environment. Refining our understanding of the United States’ environmental footprint is especially urgent given the need to better grasp the origins and evolution of the escalating climate challenges we face, most of which are water related. The rise of the United States as a global power has coincided with the exponential expansion of human activities in aquatic environments, further exacerbating the scramble for and the exploitation of water resources worldwide. We read the trajectory of American history—marked as it has been by dispossession, commodification, and securitization of water resources—as a central driver and emblematic case of our current “blue acceleration,” that is, the rapid and unprecedented expansion of human uses of aquatic environments, with severe deteriorating effects on global water systems.Footnote 14 We also think that the legacies that “the short American century” has left on our planet’s waters deserve further scholarly inquiry.Footnote 15

If our ultimate goal is chiefly interpretive, our proposed method is genuinely interdisciplinary and draws on the most recent developments in the field of environmental humanities.Footnote 16 We deliberately speak of a “water’s history” of the United States rather than of “water history.” The possessive signals an approach grounded in more-than-human perspectives and sources that historians are now beginning to embrace, one that treats water as a formative presence in history rather than merely as something upon which history is enacted.Footnote 17 To us, in fact, water has never been merely a backdrop to American development but rather a driving force and structuring medium—what Bruno Latour would call an actant—through which U.S. culture and society have evolved.Footnote 18 We borrow this term conceptually rather than adopting Actor–Network Theory’s full ethnographic methodology. In our analysis, water, through its physical properties, geographic distributions, and ecological dynamics, has actively shaped possibilities, constrained choices, and reconfigured power relations, driving institutional development and helping to determine political outcomes. A water’s history of the United States is thus a proposition that not only takes into consideration the relationships between U.S. actors and water resources—as historian Donald Worster has done in his field-shaping scholarship—but also considers water as a “place for stories,” aiming to highlight and reassess the convergence between the United States’ “situated knowledges” of water and its actual flows.Footnote 19 In this regard, a water’s history of the United States comes into conversation with a series of other national and transnational water histories, which have been uncovering the centrality of water across a variety of times and spaces.Footnote 20 Placing the American experience alongside studies of hydraulic politics in other regions—the Middle East, imperial China, colonial territories, and European water states—helps illuminate what is distinctive about the U.S. case—namely, the scale and speed of transformation—while also revealing shared patterns of modern state formation and resource capitalism that transcend any single national context. In the modern United States, as in many other parts of the world, water’s material and cultural presence has shaped how people live and prosper, and how institutions exercise power. We also think, however, that, given its global projection and sway, the United States’ rise and crises have deeply transformed the waters we all live in and off of.

Scholars have shown that water’s various forms and states—vapor, liquid, and ice—have each been historically significant. Rainfall patterns have influenced agricultural expansion, steam powered the country’s industrialization, snowpack has long determined Western water supplies, and ice has helped define Arctic sovereignty claims.Footnote 21 A comprehensive water’s history of the United States would require bringing together a wide range of interdisciplinary research and historiographical traditions to show how the “many faces of water,” as Melosi aptly terms them, have constituted not peripheral features but rather the very substance of American history.Footnote 22 That task is clearly beyond what any single essay can accomplish and remains a challenge for the field as a whole—one that will require sustained collaboration across multiple disciplines. Here, we focus primarily on liquid water and ice, the forms that have most directly shaped institutions, law, territorial control, and the human–water relations at the core of our analysis. The sections that follow provide a sort of methodological toolkit, a conceptual map rather than a comprehensive historical or historiographical account. Our idea is to use these pages to offer a tentative, preliminary way to organize an organic water’s history of the United States. We try to show how, by focusing on water’s role, it becomes possible to highlight different and complementary analytical scales, sources, times, and actors. We are aware that this is by no means an exhaustive attempt, but we see it as the starting point for a broader conversation that we hope will continue to inspire academic exchange and debate.Footnote 23

Aquatic Scales and Sources

Standard maps tend to portray water as a frame within which American development has unfolded. Yet a water-centered exploration reveals a far richer reality, challenging, first and foremost, our scales of analysis. In truth, the United States is far more aquatic and “archipelagic” than its “logo map” (the familiar contiguous United States outline) suggests.Footnote 24 As Brian Russell Roberts notes, the United States is fundamentally an oceanic nation. Its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), the band of ocean where the U.S. government exercises special rights over marine resources, has been described as the largest in the world, “spanning over 13,000 miles of coastline and containing 3.4 million square nautical miles of ocean—larger than the combined land area of all fifty states.”Footnote 25 Viewed in this light, and considering U.S. sovereign rights over seabed resources within its EEZ and on its continental shelf, including Arctic waters, the oceans do not confine the United States; they are part and parcel of its political and historical geography.Footnote 26

Furthermore, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey notes, oceans have served not merely as spaces for theorizing the materiality of American history but have themselves constituted its essential substance, specifically with regard to its global entanglements.Footnote 27 The United States’ transoceanic identity has significantly supported its imperial ambitions and activities.Footnote 28 The fluid nature of oceanic spaces, characterized by shifting jurisdictions and power relations, has enabled the emergence of new identities and the redefinition and expansion of concepts such as freedom, citizenship, and internationalism.Footnote 29

Yet, while establishing mutually beneficial relationships through reciprocal exchanges, the United States’ oceanic encounters have consistently served as key instruments of U.S. power and hegemony.Footnote 30 Pelagic waters have allowed U.S. companies to boost profits and the U.S. federal government to project and protect its power globally.Footnote 31 The vast, remote expanses of the Pacific Ocean, for instance, became a Cold War laboratory for nuclear tests and waste disposal, accelerating the arms race and heightening its existential dangers.Footnote 32 Desalination projects promised peace and prosperity through the spread of U.S. technology, while U.S. ventures into ice-covered seas and glacial regions fed narratives of scientific prowess and military dominance.Footnote 33 In short, the drive to command oceanic resources, blue economies, and seascapes has remained a shifting but enduring pillar of U.S. policies and strategies—one from which Washington has never fully stepped back.

Oceanic perspectives invite us to view American history through new spatial and analytical scales and to expand what counts as a historical source. Nautical charts, environmental impact assessments, corporate and governmental records on fisheries and shipping, diplomatic correspondence over maritime boundaries, and Indigenous oral histories become crucial sources for understanding how people and institutions in the United States have governed and exploited marine spaces.Footnote 34 Equally important, however, are non-traditional materials such as oceanographic datasets (including currents, temperatures, salinity, and chemistry), sediment cores, pollutant traces, and the bodies of marine species and coastal communities, which register the cumulative effects of extraction, militarization, and contamination.Footnote 35 The seas themselves remain largely unexplored archives—repositories of evidence that allow historians to trace vertical histories and examine shifting human–water relations.Footnote 36 Marine life, for example, has shaped not only U.S. cultural imaginaries—Moby-Dick being the classic touchstone—but also domestic politics and foreign policy, where fisheries, maritime routes, and ocean resources have repeatedly influenced national priorities.

Tuna and shrimp offer, in this regard, a telling example. By the mid-1970s, the U.S. high-seas tuna fleet—centered in San Diego and generating tens of millions of dollars in annual landings (about $75 million by 1974)—depended heavily on access to Mexican waters.Footnote 37 As nations worldwide moved toward establishing 200-nautical-mile exclusive fishing zones, the American tuna industry pressed for special treatment of highly migratory species, insisting that tuna should not be tightly constrained by new coastal limits and framing this position as a strategic national interest that reached the National Security Council.Footnote 38 In practice, U.S. negotiators prioritized protecting the tuna fleet’s access even when this meant disadvantaging other fisheries and coastal communities. The 1976 U.S.–Mexico Agreement Relating to Fisheries, negotiated alongside the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, allowed U.S. vessels continued access to highly migratory species—including tuna—within Mexico’s newly declared 200-nautical-mile zone in the eastern Pacific.Footnote 39 Meanwhile, on the Gulf side, the U.S. shrimp industry, once projected to continue rapid expansion, did not benefit from comparable carve-outs or diplomatic attention and later faced intense competition from Mexican and other foreign shrimp producers, rising costs, and collapsing dockside prices; many Gulf and south Texas communities experienced sharp economic decline as a result.Footnote 40

In the end, tuna and shrimp helped determine which coastal communities would prosper and which would be pushed into more profound marginalization; the consequences are still felt across southern Texas today. Similarly, U.S.–Mexican agreements that preserved tuna fleet access formed part of a wider regime that enabled sustained overfishing of Pacific bluefin tuna, whose spawning stock biomass collapsed to historic lows in the early 2010s before beginning a cautious rebound only in the last decade.Footnote 41 Beyond their economic value, these marine species are part of living systems that have shaped human settlement and activity in ways that exceed any single policy decision. Atlantic menhaden, for example, have long underpinned coastal ecologies and economies, feeding larger fish, marine mammals, and seabirds while supplying fertilizer and industrial inputs; intensive fishing has helped to disrupt these food webs and unsettle the communities that depend on them.Footnote 42 Oceanic lenses and sources, thus, enable us to better understand what the local, national, and even planetary consequences of the United States’ ascendancy have been. The oceanic dimensions of U.S. water history remain an underdeveloped frontier, one that the blue humanities are only beginning to chart.

Watershed Moments and Flows

While reshaping our sense of scale, water-centered narratives also challenge conventional ways of periodizing U.S. history. By placing water—and access to it—at the heart of our analysis, we can trace how changing regimes of water control have extended federal authority while contributing to democratic retrenchment. This perspective brings into view both watershed moments and the continuities that run across them.

Long before the formation of the United States—and well into its early history—Indigenous communities across North America developed sophisticated, place-based systems for managing water that reflected deep ecological knowledge and long-term stewardship. The Hohokam engineered one of the most extensive preindustrial irrigation networks in the Americas in the Sonoran Desert, sustaining agriculture for centuries through carefully maintained canals and communal water governance.Footnote 43 Recent studies have shown that Pueblo communities in the U.S. Southwest established complex systems of water retention and storage that enabled them to sustain agriculture and settlement patterns in an arid, highly variable climate.Footnote 44 In the Pacific Northwest, salmon-bearing rivers and streams have long been central to the lifeways of Native peoples, sustaining not only their physical and economic needs but also their social, cultural, spiritual, and emotional well-being. Indigenous nations practiced salmon stewardship grounded in selective harvesting and watershed care, helping to ensure the species’ renewal and the resilience of river ecosystems.Footnote 45 Around the Great Lakes, the presence of wild rice (manoomin), along with balanced harvesting and habitat preservation, allowed the Ojibwe and other Anishinaabe peoples to prosper.Footnote 46 These diverse traditions not only predated but also, for a time, coexisted with Euro-American expansion, offering enduring models of sustainable water management.

These governance systems were ways of organizing social relations, territorial claims, and intergenerational responsibility around water’s presence and flow. European colonization eventually displaced and undermined these orders, imposing legal frameworks that treated water as a resource to be allocated rather than a relation to be maintained. Within these imposed frameworks, one early fracture in U.S. water history lay in the growing divergence between the riparian-rights tradition that governed most eastern rivers and the emerging doctrine of so-called prior appropriation in the arid West.Footnote 47 Both regimes were being reshaped by the pressures of industrialization and resource extraction, which pushed lawmakers and judges to privilege intensive, capital-driven water uses over older agrarian and communal claims. Beginning in the 1810s and 1820s, textile manufacturers in New England built large dams across rivers like the Merrimack and the Charles to power their mills, fundamentally altering stream flows in ways that stretched the existing riparian norms—built on shared, “reasonable” use without substantial injury to other users—beyond their limits.Footnote 48 Mill owners needed to impound water, control its release, and maintain steady power regardless of the effects on downstream farmers, fishermen, or other mill operators.Footnote 49 State legislatures responded with Mill Acts that permitted dam builders to flood neighboring lands in exchange for compensation, effectively privileging industrial water use over older agrarian claims.Footnote 50 Courts followed, increasingly interpreting water law to favor economic development. As legal historian Morton Horwitz has shown, key decisions between the 1790s and 1820s shifted the legal standard from protecting prior users to weighing the relative efficiency of competing uses—a transformation, in his words, that left “the whole system of traditional rules … threatened with disintegration.”Footnote 51 By the middle of the nineteenth century, under the very different conditions of the arid West, settlers formalized a parallel logic in the prior appropriation doctrine, which gave even greater force to the rule that those who first diverted water for “beneficial use” held senior rights over later, junior users.Footnote 52 In landscapes where streams could shrink to a trickle or run dry for months, the humid East’s implicit assumption of relatively reliable flow simply did not hold.

In early U.S. law and rhetoric, water—especially navigable rivers and public supplies—was often cast as a common good whose benefits were meant to be broadly shared, even as actual access remained tied to property and jurisdiction.Footnote 53 The growing needs of white miners, farmers, and urban dwellers entrenched the distinction between senior and junior water rights.Footnote 54 To put it another way, water law and infrastructure became central instruments in producing long-lasting power imbalances among economic classes and racial groups.

The efforts to modernize the nation’s water systems, spearheaded by federal agencies—most notably the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation—throughout the first half of the twentieth century, marked a new phase in this water regime and did not fundamentally alter the underlying patterns of power and exclusion. Hundreds of water projects and thousands of structures were built to protect the interests of those classes and groups at the expense of others.Footnote 55 The 1902 Reclamation Act exemplifies this dynamic: after private and state-sponsored irrigation projects repeatedly failed due to inadequate funding and technical expertise, western boosters pressed the federal government for aid. Congress responded by creating the Reclamation Service and authorizing federal construction of dams, reservoirs, and canals across the arid western states and territories (later spanning seventeen so-called Reclamation states).Footnote 56 Interstate water disputes proved equally important in expanding federal authority. When states could not resolve conflicts over shared rivers on their own, they turned to federal mediation or Supreme Court adjudication. The 1948 Arkansas River Compact, for instance, required federal participation to settle decades of litigation between Kansas and Colorado, showing how interstate river disputes could outstrip state capacity. More than twenty congressionally approved interstate river compacts now allocate water among states, marking the steady deepening of federal involvement in water governance.Footnote 57 This expansion of federal authority accelerated dramatically during the Great Depression. The New Deal introduced a range of institutions responsible for flood control, navigation, irrigation, and hydropower generation.Footnote 58 Parallel to these initiatives, the federal government also led crucial sanitation reforms, improving access to potable water and addressing waste management in a rapidly urbanizing country.Footnote 59 Yet these federal interventions, while facilitating modernization, would also entrench profound inequalities in water access and quality. Historian Carl Zimring, among others, has traced how whites constructed water and sanitation as markers of racial purity, using these associations to justify unequal development.Footnote 60 The construction of strategic water infrastructure and the distribution of clean water thus reinforced existing economic, social, and racial hierarchies.Footnote 61 On the Columbia River, for example, the network of federal dams has inundated tribal homelands, disrupted salmon runs, and imposed long-term social, cultural, and economic costs on tribal communities, as recent federal and regional assessments underscore.Footnote 62

The postwar era brought another turning point that a water-centered perspective helps to illuminate: the emergence of nuclear and toxic colonialism.Footnote 63 The advent of the nuclear era impinged heavily on global waters and jeopardized communities worldwide.Footnote 64 The United States’ freshwaters—indispensable to uranium mining and milling, reactor cooling, and nuclear weapons production that helped transform the country into an atomic superpower—were heavily drawn upon and, in many places, degraded, in ways that disproportionately threatened marginalized and underrepresented communities through both scarcity and radioactive contamination.Footnote 65 In the arid lands of the Navajo Nation, for instance, where a substantial share of the uranium ore that fueled “atomic age America” was mined for the U.S. nuclear weapons program, it was water that spread disease and increased vulnerability.Footnote 66 Water moving through uranium-bearing rock carried contamination wherever it flowed; exposure followed hydrology. Unaware and uninformed workers collected cold, radioactive water seeping down mine walls as one of their few sources of freshwater for drinking, cooking, and laundry, condemning themselves, their families, and their communities to long-lasting exposure.Footnote 67 The simultaneous boom of the petrochemical industry, too, upon which the United States’ plastic revolution was grounded, came at the cost of the degradation of the country’s waters. Before the leaks in Love Canal hit national headlines, the country’s waters were already severely stricken by chemical contamination. In 1977, for instance, a chemical explosion in Columbia, Mississippi, a predominantly African American working-class community, destroyed the plant and left more than 4,500 drums of toxic chemicals on site; in the following years, leaks and flooding spread contaminants into local water sources, farms, rivers, swimming holes, and residential areas.Footnote 68 The rapidly increasing toxic waters running across the country set the boundaries between the affluent society and its victims, exposing the contradictions and inequalities embedded in the United States’ urban, industrial, and social policies.

In our own time, in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, water scarcity has emerged as a defining pressure. Just as we can trace patterns of national uneven growth by examining water’s physical presence, we can observe the varied outcomes of the American democratic experiment by focusing on instances of water scarcity and stress. The linkage is evident in the nation’s groundwater: the aquifers’ recharge rate—measured in millennia—sets a limit that no policy can accelerate.Footnote 69 Anthropologist Lucas Bessire has recently demonstrated the correlation between the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer—a primary groundwater source sustaining industrial food production across the Great Plains—and the deterioration of civic life and governance, characterized by eroding participation and trust.Footnote 70 These dynamics are the late expression of a longer history in which irrigation-driven “bonanza farming” restructured western hydrology; as David Stiller argues for the Colorado and the Rio Grande basin, the canal and irrigation projects that sustained the United States’ agricultural expansion also depleted rivers, contributed to groundwater decline, and deprived downstream users of reliable flows.Footnote 71 The consequences of agricultural water use extend beyond depletion: fertilizer and pesticide runoff from Midwestern farms flows down the Mississippi River system, feeding an oxygen-depleted dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that has at times stretched across thousands of square miles, devastating fisheries and marine ecosystems.Footnote 72 Once nutrient loads trigger algal blooms, oxygen dynamics follow their own course—policy can regulate what flows into the river system, but not the underlying biogeochemical processes in the water itself. Meanwhile, for the Chicot aquifer, which is one of the primary sources of drinking water in southwest Louisiana and southeastern Texas, significant problems—particularly in the Lake Charles–Calcasieu corridor—come from both increased use and nearby industrial petrochemical facilities, including documented releases (e.g., a 1994 ethylene dichloride spill) and dioxin contamination in adjacent estuary sediments. System-wide, the predominant pressures are over-pumping, subsidence, and saltwater intrusion—all dynamics prompting federal and local agencies to regularly test groundwater availability and quality, and pushing citizens to demand stricter control.Footnote 73 The alarming degradation of water resources due to overconsumption and pollution has driven the creation of numerous sacrifice zones across American geography, making it challenging to enforce principles of environmental justice, safety, and equality.Footnote 74

Across these periods and regions, a consistent pattern emerges: water governance in the United States has often functioned as a vector for extending state authority while concentrating benefits among propertied and racially privileged groups. From Mill Acts to the Reclamation Service and Cold War nuclear production complexes, state and federal institutions expanded their reach by claiming to manage water for the common good—yet the costs of that management fell disproportionately on Indigenous nations, communities of color, and the working poor. What unifies the Western prior appropriation regime, New Deal dam-building, and Cold War nuclear infrastructure is not merely that they involved water, but that they enacted a shared logic: water as an engine of growth, controlled by centralized expertise and allocated in ways that reinforced existing hierarchies.

Water Activism and Solidarity

For decades, urban water supplies in the United States have been a persistent source of disease; countless lakes and streams have exceeded their capacity to assimilate waste, contributing to the deterioration of the United States’ public and environmental health; and the survival of communities in arid or flood-prone regions has remained precariously dependent on unpredictable rain patterns. The construction of dams and other large-scale water infrastructures has repeatedly placed marginalized communities, downstream populations, and ecosystems at risk. Moreover, military operations and petrochemical industries have often enjoyed wide latitude to exploit and contaminate lakes, rivers, aquifers, estuaries, and marine environments. Oceanic spills, coupled with chronic underinvestment in climate resilience and disaster mitigation, have left coastal communities increasingly vulnerable to both natural and human-induced catastrophes.

The communities most affected by these policies—coastal residents, people living downstream, workers in contaminated industries—appear throughout the story we have told so far, mainly as those upon whom water decisions were imposed. But they did not remain passive. Such seemingly relentless degradation of the United States’ water resources has not gone unchallenged. The state of the country’s water has spurred new forms of social and environmental justice activism, which our proposed perspective helps us trace and understand.Footnote 75 A water’s history of the United States, therefore, signals fundamental shifts in social and political mobilization, which gave rise to both national and transnational networks of water solidarity. As historian Chad Montrie and others have shown, water infrastructures and water-intensive technologies caused profound socio-ecological damage across the country, frequently provoking local protest and unrest.Footnote 76 Nineteenth-century fish and game laws were likewise “suffused with ethnic and class conflict,” shielding corporate and elite interests while criminalizing Indigenous and working-class practices.Footnote 77 Water-powered industries spread wealth among investors but drew masses of laborers into polluted, unhealthy cities. The water-related grievances of these marginalized communities—from fishing rights to sewer access—were central to the development of American environmentalism.

In the 1960s, these forms of water activism—later embodied by groups like Michigan’s Environmental Action for Survival (ENACT), which drew attention to pollution in the Great Lakes—helped build a broader environmental constituency whose pressure contributed to the adoption of key legislation, including the Water Quality Act of 1965, the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, the Water Quality Improvement Act of 1970, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (the Clean Water Act), the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act of 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974.Footnote 78 Such a new constituency demanded stronger laws, stricter enforcement, and meaningful federal oversight. By the early 1980s, in response to rising calls for environmental justice and anti-toxics concerns, a myriad of local groups and water alliances sprang up across the country.Footnote 79 By the 1990s, U.S. environmental groups and organizations were participating in the transformation of global water governance into an integrated approach, shaping both national and international regulation.Footnote 80 This grassroots tradition has continued into the twenty-first century, from the Flint water crisis to the Standing Rock protests, demonstrating the enduring struggle for water justice.Footnote 81

One of the main novelties that water activism brought to the history of American social activism in general, and environmentalism in particular, has been its ability to operate translocally.Footnote 82 These groups often operated independently from mainstream environmental organizations, pursuing single-issue campaigns that only seemed local in scope but were in fact united by a shared commitment to defending water resources as essential to human development.Footnote 83 Water solidarity networks spread horizontally across communities and national borders, raising public awareness, exposing the shortcomings of domestic and international regulatory agencies, and demanding practical restorative actions. As broad interest in water protection emerged, access to clean water became a key sociopolitical struggle for thousands of people in the United States and around the world.Footnote 84

While these efforts have helped to mitigate the consequences of the United States’ water choices and policies, contributing to improvements in water ecologies and aquatic life alike, old and new water issues have now intersected, sparking further socioeconomic conflicts. Power plants remain among the largest withdrawers of freshwater in the United States; drought has forced farmers into new water rights battles; and the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and cloud-computing infrastructure has intensified concerns over the enormous quantities of water required to cool data servers.Footnote 85 Taken together, these overlapping strains reveal that water remains one of the central, unresolved fault lines of American environmental politics. In this arena, agricultural needs, technological ambitions, and national security continue to collide. In this regard, a focus on water can help to better identify (clashing) interests and key players in the American sociopolitical context.

Conclusion

Water has been a key driver of the United States’ political and economic transformation. Taken together, U.S. water resources are among the world’s most ecologically diverse, encompassing freshwater systems such as rivers, lakes, canals, streams, glaciers, and groundwater reservoirs, as well as brackish and saline waters in wetlands and coastal areas. These ecosystems sustain both human activities and biodiversity and are home to a remarkable variety of aquatic and amphibious species.Footnote 86 They are also dynamic systems that respond to human intervention in ways that have repeatedly constrained and redirected American development—from collapsing fisheries to spreading dead zones to aquifers being depleted far faster than they can naturally recharge.Footnote 87 These water resources and the life that inhabits them have been crucial not only to local and regional ecosystems—and, as part of the world’s inland and coastal waters, to maintaining planetary life cycles and biodiversity—but also to securing the United States’ expansion.

Given the country’s evolving relationship with water resources and the persistence of expropriation of rights, marketization of flows, and security-first governance, a positive assessment of the United States’ water history and policies remains difficult to justify. Water, which has been a crucial factor in the nation’s modern development, has often been mismanaged and undervalued, bent to the exigencies of social control or economic power. The dominant approach—one that has largely displaced traditional systems of knowledge—has been science-driven, profit-oriented, and often unsustainable.Footnote 88 The impact of such an approach on both national and global water resources is yet to be fully assessed. What stands out, however, is that the United States represents a particularly stark example of an empire that has significantly degraded the very aquatic resources that have made it, distinguished by the scale and speed of their transformation and deterioration.Footnote 89 Understanding this legacy of exploitation and mismanagement becomes ever more urgent as climate change intensifies water crises worldwide. A water’s history of the United States thus reveals not only the centrality of water to American development but also the imperative to reimagine our impact on and relationship with the aquatic environments that sustain all life.

Footnotes

We are grateful to the colleagues who convened at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in May 2025 for the conference “A Water’s History of the United States.” Their contributions sharpened our thinking in ways that are reflected throughout this essay. We also thank the anonymous reviewers of Modern American History, whose critical readings improved successive drafts. Finally, we are indebted to Sarah B. Snyder and Darren Dochuk, executive editors of the journal, for their guidance in shaping this essay and for entrusting us with the guest editorship of the special issue in which it appears.

References

1 Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, D.C., 1894), 199. See also Benjamin Horace Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies (New York, 1924); and Curtis P. Nettels, The Roots of American Civilization: History of American Colonial Life (New York, 1938).

2 Jeff Crane, The Environment in American History: Nature and the Formation of the United States (London, 2015); Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (New York, 2018); Paul Frymer, “‘A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours’: Territorial Expansion, Land Policy, and U.S. State Formation,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 1 (2014): 119–44; John D. Leshy, Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands (New Haven, CT, 2022).

3 Robert R. Crifasi, A Land Made from Water: Appropriation and the Evolution of Colorado’s Landscape, Ditches, and Water Institutions (Denver, CO, 2016); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1992).

4 Helen M. Rozwadowski, “The Promise of Ocean History for Environmental History,” The Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 136–9; Donald J. Pisani, “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: Nationalizing the History of Water in the United States,” Environmental History 5, no. 4 (2000): 466–82; Donald J. Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (Berkeley, CA, 2002).

5 U.S. Department of the Interior, People, Land & Water, June 2017–ongoing, https://www.doi.gov/interiormuseum/people-land-water (accessed Nov. 15, 2025).

6 Steve Mentz, An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (London, 2024); Stacy Alaimo, “Introduction: Science Studies and the Blue Humanities,” Configurations 24, no. 4 (2019): 429–32; Serpil Oppermann, Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene (New York, 2023). On climate resilience and the entanglement of human infrastructure with marine life, see Rob Verchick, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience (New York, 2023).

7 Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (New York, 1992); Worster, Rivers of Empire. See also Char Miller, Water in the West: A High Country News Reader (Corvallis, OR, 2000); Norris Hundley Jr., Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA, 2009); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York, 1986); Patricia Limerick and Jason Hanson, A Ditch in Time: The City, the West, and Water (Golden, CO, 2012); Thomas Zeller and Christof Mauch, Rivers in History: Perspectives on Waterways in Europe and North America (Pittsburgh, PA, 2008); and Elsa Devienne, Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York, 2024).

8 Worster, Rivers of Empire, 7. A bibliographical overview of American rivers and their role in shaping settler colonialism is in Sigma Colón, “Watershed Colonialism and Popular Geographies of North American Rivers,” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, 8, https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/watershed-colonialism/ (accessed Nov. 15, 2025). See also K. Maria D. Lane, Fluid Geographies: Water, Science, and Settler Colonialism in New Mexico (Chicago, 2024).

9 Jason Anthony Robison, ed., Cornerstone at the Confluence: Navigating the Colorado River Compact’s Next Century (Tucson, AZ, 2022); Andrew Curley, “Colonial Becoming: An Unfolding Story of the Colorado River,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 24, no. 1 (2025): 47–61.

10 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2017); Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia, PA, 2018); Mark William Hauser, Anna S. Agbe-Davies, Mary C. Beaudry, Charles R. Cobb, Karen B. Graubart, Krysta Ryzewski, Alice V. M. Samson, and Barbara L. Voss, “A Political Ecology of Water and Enslavement: Water Ways in Eighteenth-Century Caribbean Plantations,” Current Anthropology 58, no. 2 (2017): 227–56; Philip D. Morgan, John R. McNeill, Matthew Mulcahy, and Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean (New York, 2022); David Silkenat, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (New York, 2022).

11 Donald J. Pisani, “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian”; Peter Rogers, America’s Water: Federal Roles and Responsibilities (Boston, MA, 1993). See also Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, “A Water’s History of the United States,” Middelburg, May 21–23, 2025; American Antiquarian Society, “Water, Land, and Ecology: Doing Environmental History in Early America,” Workshop, Sept. 1, 2023; 70th Annual Utah State Historical Society Conference, “Water at the Confluence of Past and Future,” Oct. 26, 2022; and Columbia University, Center for Science and Society, “All Water Has a Memory: Rivers and American History,” Oct. 19–Nov. 2, 2020.

12 Martin V. Melosi, Water in North American Environmental History (London, 2022).

13 Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle, WA, 2013).

14 Elizabeth Mendenhall, “Understanding the Blue Acceleration: What It Means, How It Works, and Why It Matters,” Global Environmental Politics 24, no. 3 (2024): 191–9.

15 Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., The Short American Century: A Postmortem (Cambridge, MA, 2013). On the necessity to study the impact of the United States on the “anthropocene,” see John R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2016); Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York, 2011); and Richard Lane, “The American Anthropocene: Economic Scarcity and Growth during the Great Acceleration,” Geoforum 99 (2019): 11–21.

16 See, among others, Robert S. Emmett, David E. Nye, The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction (Boston, MA, 2017); Jeremy Chow, ed., Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (Wheaton, PA, 2022); Hannes Bergthaller, Rob Emmett, Adeline Johns-Putra, Agnes Kneitz, Susanna Lidström, Shane McCorristine, Isabel Pérez Ramos, Dana Phillips, Kate Rigby, and Libby Robin, “Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities,” Environmental Humanities 5, no. 1 (2014): 261–76; and Stephen Muecke, Andrea Gaynor, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, and Matthew Chrulew, “Worlds and Stories: Description in Environmental Humanities Writing,” Environmental Humanities 17, no. 2 (2025): 506–24.

17 Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor, “More-Than-Human Histories,” Environmental History 25, no. 4 (2020): 711–35.

18 For water as an “actant” and structuring medium, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York, 2005). On water’s agency, see Jamie Linton, What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction (Vancouver, BC, 2010); Jamie Linton and Jessica Budds, “The Hydrosocial Cycle: Defining and Mobilizing a Relational-Dialectical Approach to Water,” Geoforum, 57 (2014): 170–80; Erik Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power (New York, 2004); and Rutgerd Boelens, Jaime Hoogesteger, Erik Swyngedouw, Jeroen Vos, and Philippus Wester, “Hydrosocial Territories: A Political Ecology Perspective,” Water International 41, no. 1 (2016): 1–14.

19 Worster, Rivers of Empire. On the environment–human relationship, see Paul S. Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” The Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 94–119. On “situated knowledges,” see Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. On water and, more generally, on the environment as a place for stories, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” The Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1347–76; and Mart Stewart, “Narrative, Place, and Environmental Justice,” Environmental History 28, no. 1 (2023): 4–13.

20 Christopher Ward, Sandra Ruckstuhl, Isabelle Learmont, The History of Water in the Land Once Called Palestine: Scarcity, Conflict and Loss in Middle East Water Resources (London, 2023); Erik Mostert, “Water and National Identity in the Netherlands: The History of an Idea,” Water History, 12 (2020), 311–29; Ronald C. Po, The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (New York, 2018); Corey Ross, Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Princeton, NJ, 2024); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2006); David Kinkela, Teresa Meade, and Enrique C. Ochoa, eds., “Water: History, Power, Crisis,” special issue of Radical History Review 3, no. 2 (2013).

21 Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979); Andrew Lambert et al., “Dust Impacts of Rapid Agricultural Expansion on the Great Plains,” Geophysical Research Letters 47, no. 3 (2020); Andreas Malm, “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry,” Historical Materialism 21, no. 1 (2013): 15–68; Ernesto Trujillo and Noah P. Molotch, “Snowpack Regimes of the Western United States,” Water Resources Research 50, no. 7 (2014): 5611–23; Stephanie Holmes Didwania, “Breaking the Ice: Emerging Legal Issues in Arctic Sovereignty,” Chicago Journal of International Law 9, no. 1 (2008): 323–51; Robert D. Parker, “Emerging Legal Concerns in the Arctic: Sovereignty, Navigation and Land-Claim Disputes,” Polar Record 46, no. 1 (2010): 15–32.

22 Martin V. Melosi, “The Many Faces of Water,” paper presented at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies Conference “A Water’s History of the United States,” May 2025.

23 To further promote this conversation, we have recently launched the Blue History Network, at https://bluehistorynetwork.org/ (accessed Nov. 16, 2025).

24 Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, eds., Archipelagic American Studies (Durham, NC, 2017). On the “logo map,” see Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (New York, 2019), 3.

25 U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, An Ocean Blueprint for the 21st Century (Washington, D.C., 2004). Also in Brian Russell Roberts, Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America (Durham, NC, 2017), 5.

26 Kären Wigen, “Introduction,” AHR Forum: Oceans of History, The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 717–21; Sujit Sivasundaram, Alison Bashford, and David Armitage, “Introduction: Writing World Oceanic Histories,” in Oceanic Histories, eds. David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram (New York, 2017), 1–28.

27 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” Comparative Literature 69, no. 1 (2017): 32–44.

28 Michelle Burnham, Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific (New York, 2019); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Champaign, IL, 2016); Gerald Horne, The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War (Honolulu, HI, 2007).

29 Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York, 2015).

30 Paul Kennedy, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II (New Haven, CT, 2022); James Stavridis, Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans (New York, 2017).

31 Maynard Silva, Ocean Resources And U.S. Intergovernmental Relations in the 1980s (London, 1987); Daniel R. Headrick, “Strategic and Military Aspects of Submarine Telegraph Cables, 1851-1945,” in Communications Under the Seas: The Evolving Cable Network and Its Implications, eds. Bernard Finn and Daqing Yang (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Jeffrey G. Barlow, From Hot War to Cold: The U.S. Navy and National Security Affairs, 1945–1955 (Stanford, CA, 2009).

32 Jon Mitchell, Poisoning the Pacific: The US Military’s Secret Dumping of Plutonium, Chemical Weapons, and Agent Orange (New York, 2020); Lauren Hirshberg, Suburban Empire: Cold War Militarization in the US Pacific (Berkeley, CA, 2022); Nic Maclellan, “The Nuclear Age in the Pacific Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific, 17, no. 2 (2005): 363–72.

33 Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “An American Miracle in the Desert: Environmental Crisis and Nuclear-Powered Desalination in the Middle East,” in Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945–1990, eds. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R. McNeill (Pittsburgh, PA, 2019), 205–218; Gretchen Heefner, Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments (Chicago, 2025); Julia Herzberg, Christian Kehrt, and Franziska Torma, eds., Ice and Snow in the Cold War: Histories of Extreme Climatic Environments (New York, 2018).

34 Yuan Shu, Hsiu-chuan Lee, and Otto Heim, eds., Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies (Hong Kong, 2019).

35 Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Durham, NC, 2020); Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley, CA, 2009); Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis, MN, 2015).

36 Helen M. Rozwadowski, “The Promise of Ocean History for Environmental History”; Sujit Sivasundaram, Alison Bashford, and David Armitage, “Introduction: Writing World Oceanic Histories”; Wilko Graf von Hardenberg and Martin Mahony, “Introduction: Up, Down, Round and Round: Verticalities in the History of Science,” Centaurus, 62 (2020): 595–611; Prasenjit Duara, “Oceans as the Paradigm of History,” Theory, Culture & Society 38, no. 7–8 (2021): 143–66; Margaret Cohen, A Cultural History of the Sea (London, 2021).

37 Biliana Cicin-Sain, Michael K. Orbach, Stephen J. Sellers, and Enrique Manzanilla, “Conflictual Interdependence: United States-Mexican Relations on Fishery Resources,” Natural Resources Journal 26, no. 4 (1986): 769–92; F. David Froman, “The 200-Mile Exclusive Economic Zone: Death Knell for the American Tuna Industry,” 13 San Diego Law Review 707 (1976).

38 Memorandum NSC-U/DM-109D From the Chairman of the National Security Council Under Secretaries Committee (Ingersoll) to President Ford, Washington, Feb. 6, 1975, in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1969–1976, Volume E-3, Documents on Global Issues, 1973–1976, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve03/d16 (accessed Nov. 16, 2025); Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Scowcroft) to President Ford, Washington, Mar. 1, 1976, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Volume E-3, Documents on Global Issues, 1973–1976, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve03/d24 (accessed Nov. 16, 2025); Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Scowcroft) to President Ford, Washington, Sept. 23, 1976, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Volume E-11, Part 1, Documents on Mexico; Central America; and the Caribbean, 1973–1976, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve11p1/d103 (accessed Nov. 16, 2025).

39 On the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, see Office of the White House Press Secretary, President Signs H.R. 200, Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, Apr. 13, 1976, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7343523 (accessed Nov. 16, 2025); and Margaret E. Peloso, “Introduction to the Magnuson-Stevens Act,” in Randall S. Abate, Robin Kundis Craig, Climate Change Impacts on Ocean and Coastal Law: U.S. and International Perspectives (New York, 2015). On the 1976 U.S.–Mexico agreement on fisheries, see United States of America and Mexico Agreement Relating to Fisheries (with Annex, Appendix and Exchange of Notes). Signed at Mexico City on Nov. 24, 1976, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%201229/volume-1229-I-19848-English.pdf (accessed Nov. 16, 2025).

40 Donald R. Whitaker, “The U.S. Shrimp Industry: Past Trends and Prospects for the 1970s,” Marine Fisheries Review 35, no. 5–6 (1973): 23–30; National Marine Fisheries Service, Foreign Fishery Development, “Mexico’s Fisheries and Their Development,” Marine Fisheries Review 43, no. 5 (1980): 26–30.

41 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries, “From Overfished to Sustainable Harvests: Pacific Bluefin Tuna Rebound to New Highs,” Featured Story, June 25, 2024, https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/overfished-sustainable-harvests-pacific-bluefin-tuna-rebound-new-highs (accessed Nov. 16, 2025). See also International Scientific Committee for Tuna and Tuna-like Species in the North Pacific Ocean (ISC), “Fisheries Statistics,” https://isc.fra.go.jp/fisheries_statistics/index.html and The Pew Environment Group, “The Story of Pacific Bluefin Tuna,” https://www.pew.org/-/media/assets/2013/04/23/tunastoryofpacificbluefin.pdf (accessed Nov. 16, 2025).

42 H. Bruce Franklin, The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America (Washington, D.C., 2007); K. A. Anstead et al., “The Path to an Ecosystem Approach for Forage Fish Management: A Case Study of Atlantic Menhaden,” Frontiers in Marine Science 8 (2021).

43 Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New York, 2002); Emil W. Haury, The Hohokam: Desert Farmers and Craftsmen (Tucson, AZ, 1976); Linda M. Gregonis and Victoria R. Evans, The Hohokam and Their World: An Exploration of Art and Iconography (Tucson, AZ, 2025).

44 Donna M. Glowacki, Gonzalo Huidobro-Marin, Sean Field, and Alan F. Hamlet, “Ancestral Pueblo Water Management: Reinvestigating the Far View Reservoir,” Journal of Field Archaeology 50, no. 7 (2025): 614–27.

45 Courtney Carothers et al., “Indigenous Peoples and Salmon Stewardship: A Critical Relationship,” Ecology and Society 26, no. 1 (2021): 1–22; Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995); William I. Atlas et al., “Indigenous Systems of Management for Culturally and Ecologically Resilient Pacific Salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) Fisheries,” BioScience 71, no. 2 (2021): 186–204.

46 Kaitlin Stack Whitney, “Manoomin: The Taming of Wild Rice in the Great Lakes Region,” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia no. 2 (2015), https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/6830 (accessed Nov. 26, 2025); Andrea T. Kozich et al., “Perspectives on Water Resources among Anishinaabe and Non-Native Residents of the Great Lakes Region,” Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education 163, no. 1 (2018): 94–108.

47 Donald J. Pisani, “Enterprise and Equity: A Critique of Western Water Law in the Nineteenth Century,” Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1987): 15–37; David H. Getches, Water Law in a Nutshell, 5th ed. (St. Paul, MN, 2015).

48 Patrick M. Malone, Waterpower in Lowell: Engineering and Industry in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, MD, 2009); Chad Montrie, “Overview: Water Power, Industrial Manufacturing, and Environmental Transformation in 19th-Century New England,” Energy History Online (Yale University, 2023), https://energyhistory.yale.edu/water-power-industrial-manufacturing-and-environmental-transformation-in-19th-century-new-england/ (accessed Nov. 26, 2025); Paul E. Rivard, A New Order of Things: How the Textile Industry Transformed New England (Hanover, NH, 2002).

49 Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Cambridge, UK, 1991).

50 Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA, 1977).

51 Morton J. Horwitz, “The Transformation in the Conception of Property in American Law, 1780–1860,” University of Chicago Law Review 40, no. 2 (1973): 253.

52 Norris Hundley Jr., Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West (Berkeley, CA, 1975); David B. Schorr, “Appropriation as Agrarianism: Distributive Justice in the Creation of Property Rights,” Ecology Law Quarterly 32, no. 1 (2005): 3–71.

53 Kenneth R. Wright, ed., Water Rights of the Eastern United States (Denver, CO, 1998); Carol M. Rose, “The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property,” University of Chicago Law Review 53, no. 3 (1986): 711–81; Sandra B. Zellmer and Jessica Harder, “Is Water Property?” Nebraska Lawyer (2007), https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/lawfacpub/article/1109/&path_info=Zellmer_2007_NL_Is_Water_Property.pdf (accessed Nov. 25, 2025).

54 Douglas R. Littlefield, “Water Rights during the California Gold Rush: Conflicts over Economic Points of View,” The Western Historical Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1983): 415–34; Crifasi, A Land Made from Water; Worster, Rivers of Empire.

55 Donald J. Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (New York, 2002).

56 William D. Rowley, The Bureau of Reclamation: Origins and Growth to 1945, vol. 1 (Denver, CO, 2006).

57 Ival V. Goslin, “Interstate River Compacts: Impact on Colorado,” Denver Journal of International Law & Policy 6, no. 3 (1976): 415–439; J. C. Muys, “Allocation and Management of Interstate Water Resources: The Law of Interstate Compacts,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 6 (1976): 291–342; Douglas S. Kenney, Water Allocation Compacts in the West: An Overview (Boulder, CO, 2002); John D. Leshy, “Interstate Groundwater Resources: The Federal Role,” Virginia Environmental Law Journal 14 (1995): 1475–98.

58 Douglas Brinkley, Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America (New York, 2017); Neil Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York, 2009); Hannah Hollemann, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism (New Haven, CT, 2018); Robert A. Shanley, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and Water Pollution Control Policy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1988), 319–30; Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds., FDR and the Environment (New York, 2009).

59 Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present (Pittsburgh, PA, 2008); Jouni Paavola, “Interstate Water Pollution Problems and Elusive Federal Water Pollution Policy in the United States, 1900–1948,” Environment and History 12, no. 4 (2006): 435–65.

60 Carl A. Zimring, Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (New York, 2015).

61 See, among others, Wendy Nelson Espeland, The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest (Chicago, IL, 1998); and Paul C. Rosier, “Dam Building and Treaty Breaking: The Kinzua Dam Controversy, 1936–1958,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 119, no. 4 (1995): 345–68.

62 U.S. Department of the Interior, Report on Historic, Ongoing, and Cumulative Impacts of Federal Columbia River Dams on Tribal Communities (Washington, D.C., June 2024); Northwest Power and Conservation Council, “Dams: Impacts on Salmon and Steelhead,” https://www.nwcouncil.org/reports/columbia-river-history/damsimpacts (accessed Nov. 26, 2025).

63 On nuclear colonialism, see, among others, Danielle Endres, Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting (Columbus, OH, 2023); and Vincent J. Intondi, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford, CA, 2015). On toxic colonialism see Jennifer Thomson, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (Chapel Hill, NC, 2019); Luke W. Cole, Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York, 2001); David Naguib Pellow, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Eileen McGurty, Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice (New Brunswick, NJ, 2007); Joshua Kahn, Stephen D’Arcy, Tony Weis, and Toban Black, eds., A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice (Oakland, CA, 2014); and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (Boston, MA, 2020).

64 Dean W. Kohlhoff, Amchitka and the Bomb: Nuclear Testing in Alaska (Seattle, WA, 2002); Keith M. Parsons and Robert A. Zaballa, Bombing the Marshall Islands: A Cold War Tragedy (New York, 2017); Davide Orsini, The Atomic Archipelago: US Nuclear Submarines and Technopolitics of Risk in Cold War Italy (Pittsburgh, PA, 2022).

65 Per Högselius and Siegfried Evens, eds., The Nuclear-Water Nexus (Cambridge, MA, 2025). See also Martin V. Melosi, Atomic Age America (London, 2012).

66 “The Front End of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: Uranium Mining and Milling,” in Preliminary Inventory to the Mobilization for Survival Records, The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, box 1, folder “Black Hills & Paha Sapa, 1980,” 2. See also Geoffrey H. Fettus and Matthew G. McKinzie, Nuclear Fuel’s Dirty Beginnings: Environmental Damage and Public Health Risks From Uranium Mining in the American West, Natural Resources Defense Council, Mar. 2012, https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/uranium-mining-report.pdf (accessed Nov. 16, 2025); Stephanie A. Malin, The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice (New Brunswick, NJ, 2015); Carrie Arnold, “Once Upon a Mine: The Legacy of Uranium on the Navajo Nation,” Environmental Health Perspectives 122, no. 2 (2014): 44–9; Doug Brugge, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-Lewis, eds., The Navajo People and Uranium Mining (Albuquerque, NM, 2007).

67 Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis, MN, 2015).

68 Elizabeth Palmberg, “A Toxic Battle for Justice,” Sojourners, Mar. 2009, https://sojo.net/magazine/march-2009/toxic-battle-justice (accessed May 17, 2025); Michael Weisskopf, “Pollution-Tied Ills Unite Mississippi Blacks, Whites: Columbia Group Demands U.S. Cleanup,” Washington Post, Dec. 27, 1987.

69 Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian; Robert Jerome Glennon, Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters (Washington, D.C., 2002). See also U.S. Geological Survey, Principal Aquifers of the United States, https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/principal-aquifers-united-states (accessed May 15, 2025).

70 Lucas Bessire, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton, NJ, 2021).

71 David Stiller, Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West: First in Line for the Rio Grande (Reno, NV, 2021).

72 On the connection between agricultural runoff and Gulf hypoxia, see Nancy N. Rabalais, R. Eugene Turner, and Donald Scavia, “Beyond Science into Policy: Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia and the Mississippi River,” BioScience 52, no. 2 (2002): 129–42. For recent assessments, see Nancy N. Rabalais, “Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia: Past, Present, and Future,” Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin 28, no. 4 (2019): 117–24. NOAA has measured the dead zone at over 7,000 square miles in peak years, an area roughly the size of New Jersey; see NOAA, “Larger-than-average Gulf of Mexico ‘dead zone’ measured,” Aug. 3, 2021, https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/larger-than-average-gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-measured (accessed Nov. 26, 2025).

73 NOAA, Office of Response and Restoration, “Ethylene Dichloride Spill; Calcasieu River, Lake Charles, Louisiana,” IncidentNews, May 31, 1994, https://incidentnews.noaa.gov/incident/7016 (accessed Aug. 12, 2025); U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Region 6, Calcasieu Estuary Remedial Investigation, Lake Charles, Louisiana: Final Remedial Investigation Report, Aug. 2003, https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2021-08/calcasieu_estuary_final_remedial_investigation.pdf (accessed Nov. 16, 2025); Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), Public Health Assessment (Initial Public Comment): Calcasieu Parish (Mossville) Area of Interest (AOI), Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, July 9, 2013, https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/hac/pha/CalcasieuParishLA/Mossville_LA_PHA_Initial_Public_Comment_07-09-2013.pdf (accessed Nov. 16, 2025); EPA Region 6, Aug. 2003, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), Public Health Assessment (Initial Public Comment): Calcasieu Parish (Mossville) Area of Interest (AOI), Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, online https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/hac/pha/CalcasieuParishLA/Mossville_LA_PHA_Initial_Public_Comment_07-09-2013.pdf (accessed Dec. 2, 2025), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, July 9, 2013 (accessed Nov. 16, 2025); Mark C. Kasmarek and James L. Robinson, Hydrogeology and Simulation of Ground-Water Flow and Land-Surface Subsidence in the Northern Part of the Gulf Coast Aquifer System, Texas, U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2004–5102 (Reston, VA, 2004) doi: https://doi.org/10.3133/sir20045102; John K. Lovelace, Jared W. Fontenot, and C. Paul Frederick, Withdrawals, Water Levels, and Specific Conductance in the Chicot Aquifer System in Southwestern Louisiana, 2000–03, U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2004–5212, 2004.

74 Steve Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Christina Dunbar-Hester, Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond (Chicago, IL, 2023); Friends of the Mississippi River, The Dead Zone: How the Midwest kills marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, https://fmr.org/dead-zone-how-midwest-kills-marine-life-gulf-mexico (accessed May 15, 2025); Nathalie Koch, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (New York, 2022).

75 Ellen Griffith Spears, Rethinking the American Environmental Movement post-1945 (London, 2019); Eileen McGurty, Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice (New Brunswick, NJ, 2007); Paul C. Rosier, ed., Environmental Justice in North America (London, 2024).

76 Chad Montrie, The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (Berkeley, CA, 2018); Adam Levine, “Sewers, Pollution, and Public Health in Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Legacies: Pennsylvania and the Environment 10, no. 1 (2010): 14–9; Sandra Zellmer, “United States: The Emergence of Environmental Considerations,” in Joseph W. Dellapenna, Joyeeta Gupta (eds.), The Evolution of the Law and Politics of Water (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2009), 205–23.

77 Montrie, The Myth of Silent Spring, 55.

78 Michigan in the World, Great Lakes Pollution, https://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/environmentalism/exhibits/show/main_exhibit/pollution_politics/great-lakes-pollution (accessed May 15, 2025); Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (New York, 2017); Paul Charles Milazzo, Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945–1972 (Lawrence, KS, 2016); David A. Keiser and Joseph S. Shapiro, “US Water Pollution Regulation over the Past Half Century: Burning Waters to Crystal Springs?” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 4 (2019): 51–75; N. William Hines, “History of the 1972 Clean Water Act: The Story behind How the 1972 Act became the Capstone on a Decade of Extraordinary Environmental Reform,” George Washington Journal of Energy and Environmental Law 4, no. 2 (2013): 80–106.

79 Scott Dewey, “Working-Class Environmentalism in America,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.690 (accessed May 17, 2025).

80 Judith A. Layzer and Alexis Schulman, “IWRM in the United States: Integration in the Chesapeake Bay Program,” International Journal of Water Governance 1 (2013): 237–64.

81 Lindsey J. Butler, Madeleine K. Scammell, and Eugene B. Benson, “The Flint, Michigan, Water Crisis: A Case Study in Regulatory Failure and Environmental Injustice,” Environmental Justice 9, no. 4 (2016): 93–7; Benjamin J. Pauli, Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis (Cambridge, MA, 2019); Nick Estes, “Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context,” Wicazo Sa Review 32, no. 2 (2017): 115–22; On Standing Rock, see Erich Steinman, “Why Was Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL Campaign So Historic? Factors Affecting American Indian Participation in Social Movement Collaborations and Coalitions,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42, no. 7 (2019), 1070–90.

82 Dario Fazzi, Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement (New York, 2023).

83 Stacy Silveira, “The American Environmental Movement: Surviving Through Diversity,” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 28, no. 497 (2001): 497–532.

84 Martin V. Melosi, Water in North American Environmental History; Rutgerd Boelens, David Getches, and Armando Guevara-Gil, eds., Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity (London, 2010); Caitlin Schroering, Global Solidarities against Water Grabbing: Without Water, We Have Nothing (Manchester, UK, 2025).

85 Water Footprint Calculator, “Google Data Center Water Use in the US Revealed To Be a Lot,” Jan. 20, 2023, https://watercalculator.org/news/news-briefs/google-data-center-water/ (accessed Nov. 16, 2025).

86 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Report on the Environment: Water, https://www.epa.gov/report-environment/water (accessed May 14, 2025). See also Karrigan Börk, “Aquatic Biodiversity Management in the United States,” in Biodiversity Laws, Policies and Science in Europe, the United States and China, eds. Giovanni Antonelli, Tianbao Qin, Maria Vittoria Ferroni, and Alex Erwin (Cham, Switzerland, 2024), 197–217; NatureServe, States of the Union: Ranking America’s Biodiversity (Arlington, VA, 2002); David M. Olson and Eric Dinerstein, “The Global 200: Priority Ecoregions for Global Conservation,” BioScience 51, no. 11 (2001): 933–38; Cristina D. B. Balian et al., “The Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment: An Overview of the Results,” Hydrobiologia 595 (2008): 627–37.

87 Jeremy B. C. Jackson et al., “Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems,” Science 293, no. 5530 (2001): 629–637; Nancy N. Rabalais, R. Eugene Turner, and Donald Scavia, “Beyond Science into Policy”; Bridget R. Scanlon et al., “Groundwater Depletion and Sustainability of Irrigation in the US High Plains and Central Valley,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 24 (2012): 9320–5.

88 On the role of traditional environmental (and water) knowledge, see Daniel McCool, Native Waters: Contemporary Indian Water Settlements and the Second Treaty Era (Tucson, AZ, 2006); and Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Durham, NC, 2022). On the shaping of America’s modern approach to water management and some of its (legalistic) excesses, see Royal C. Gardner, Waters of the United States: POTUS, SCOTUS, WOTUS, and the Politics of a National Resource (Washington, D.C., 2024). On the idea to reconnect different systems of water of knowledge, see Alice Outwater, Water: A Natural History (New York, 1996).

89 Ellen F. Arnold, Water in World History (London, 2025).

Supplementary material: File

Di Tommaso and Fazzi supplementary material

Di Tommaso and Fazzi supplementary material
Download Di Tommaso and Fazzi supplementary material(File)
File 206.9 KB