This article invites readers to examine water as an active force in U.S. history rather than a backdrop to national development. Complementing traditional historiographies and drawing on blue humanities, we reframe national narratives by linking the country’s oceanic reach to domestic hydrology and imperial expansion, positioning the United States as a key driver and emblematic case of the “blue acceleration.” A water-centered lens reveals how water availability and management extended state power, created sacrifice zones, fostered uneven development, and continue to test American democracy. The essay offers a conceptual map for reimagining the U.S. past and human–water relations in a warming world.

This article examines the impact of industrial-era waste crises on the hydrology of an urban New England landscape and sites beyond. It chronicles a time when the city of Providence, Rhode Island, was generating ever-higher volumes of trash despite lacking the infrastructure to send it “away.” Instead, from the 1880s until the 1950s, officials encouraged the conversion of inner-city ponds and lakes into landfills, with each filling more quickly than the last. This trend continued until virtually all low, wet places had been filled, along with significant stretches of the urban coastline. Thereafter, having exhausted other options, Providence began to outsource its trash to an exurban landfill (and from there, across chains of the global waste economy to sites unknown to local actors). It is a largely forgotten history, but as the author illustrates, the hydrological conditions of today are still shaped by the waste management practices of the past.

This article describes the nineteenth-century landscape of surface water distribution in cities of the U.S. West, focusing on its persistence after the advent of modern water mains, based on studies of San Antonio, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Phoenix, Arizona. These systems of ditches, acequias, zanjas, and canals began as the primary urban water supply, then later comprised a secondary system complementing the mains. Ditch networks shrank in the twentieth century, but this ostensibly obsolete waterscape survived for decades and in many places to the present. Ditches persisted because they continued to serve the purposes of their users, because sanitary reforms abated their former pollution, and because new categories of utility emerged in amenity, heritage, and ecosystem services. The study takes the perspective of users as well as providers and finds, in contrast to conventional stories of hydraulic modernity, a continuing example of “water plurality.”

When Vietnamese refugees came to the Gulf Coast they were attracted to the region, in part, because of the fishing industry. But their entry into the fishery created friction with white fishers who had fished those waters for years. This friction would result in violence. This article anchors this history in the marine environment of coastal Texas. Many white fishers objected to Vietnamese resettlement because of how the Vietnamese fished. Local fishers had, for years, worried about the fisheries given decades of overfishing and pollution. In this context, white fishers weaponized these very real anxieties to argue that the Vietnamese were a threat to the coastal ecosystem. This threat the Vietnamese supposedly posed to these waters, along with the racism and xenophobia of white fishers, accounted for the depth of division and the degree of violence along the coast of Texas during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It may be time to “de-territorialize historical narratives of the United States.”1 As the premise of this special issue demonstrates, American history has long been told through a land-centered lens—one that treats water as a backdrop or boundary. Yet when we shift perspective to view the U.S. past through water or the shifting interface between land and water, familiar narratives transform. In some instances, literature and film have offered ways of reorienting our perceptions by giving water prominence over land as a driving force behind such narratives. Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction classic Dune does just that (Figure 1). He centers attention on the fictional desert planet, Arrakis, as the axis of his story. This choice seems to place aridity and desolation at the heart of the book. As the only source of the highly coveted “spice”—a substance that can “bend space” to make galactic travel possible—Arrakis becomes a battleground for interstellar warfare. Below the surface of the planet, figuratively and literally, the indigenous population of desert-savvy Fremen stores untold quantities of water, contrary to the popular view that Fremen society is weak because it is environmentally vulnerable without a sufficient water supply. However, the potential of their water to remake Arrakis is their hidden power, possibly more so than the presence of spice.2

In 1927, the city of Santa Barbara, California, began construction of a rubble mound breakwater to create a protected yacht harbor. The initial breakwater was an L-shaped structure that left a gap between the short “arm” of the breakwater and the shore, and engineers believed this configuration would allow sand to continue its normal movement along the coast.1 The engineers who designed the structure acknowledged that, “The design of a harbor on a sandy coast is one of the most difficult problems of engineering.” They anticipated some shoaling of the harbor and erosion of the beach to the east, particularly during storms.2 Their report framed the breakwater as an experiment in which trial-and-error would lead to an ideal harbor for the city, but they downplayed both risks and costs involved, including projecting that “the annual cost for maintenance will be negligible.”3 This optimism would prove badly misguided, as sand almost immediately began to fill the new harbor.

Although you wouldn’t know it from reading the historiography, dredges played an essential role in expanding and retaining the American empire in the Pacific. Dredges built a string of ports on the Pacific Coast, from Seattle, WA to San Diego, CA. Dredges constructed seaports in Honolulu and Pearl Harbor in Hawai’i and Manila Bay in the Philippines. Dredges turned atolls and desert isles, such as Midway, Guam, and Wake, into a constellation of harbors for ships and seaplanes. In short, dredges literally built the infrastructure of the empire.1

Histories of American water have tended to flow in two dimensions, tracing surface waters across horizontal space and only rarely descending into the earth below. Rivers, wetlands, dams, and canals have defined how we understand our relationship with this vital resource, and with the diverse human and more-than-human actors who share it. Foundational works by Donald Worster and Norris Hundley traced the rise of hydraulic societies in the American West, showing how rivers, dams, and aqueducts enabled both state formation and capitalist expansion, while Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi foregrounded water infrastructure in the field of urban environmental history.1 More recent scholarship has explored cultural and social histories of water, including more-than-human perspectives, environmental justice, Indigenous water rights, and the political ecologies of urban and rural water systems, expanding the field well beyond its earlier focus on engineering and state-building.2

Before the planters arrived, the Mississippi River Delta was a swampy jungle. In his 1941 memoir Lanterns on the Levee, William Alexander Percy, a prominent member of the regional plantation elite, described what the Delta might have looked like in those early days, with an emphasis on the area’s fluid nature. “A still country it must have been then, ankle-deep in water, mostly in shadow, with mere flickers of sunshine, and they motey and yellow and thick like syrup.”1 But in the early nineteenth century, news had started to spread about the fertility of the Delta soil. The younger sons of plantation families in the eastern states, looking for new land to plant staple crops, began to move west, turning the Deep South of the United States into the vertex of the cotton frontier. In Mississippi they settled near the river, which provided transportation, information, and recreation, in the form of leisure trips to New Orleans. “The real highway was the river,” Percy wrote in his personal history of the Mississippi Delta. The steamer Pargo regularly arrived on Sunday mornings in the Delta town of Greenville. Most people would be in church then, but when the Pargo’s whistle blew, the men immediately stood up from the pews and made for the riverfront, to hear the latest news and gossips.2 Knowledge was an important cargo aboard riverboats like the Pargo.3

This photoarticle interrogates the notion that groundwater is an inherently democratic resource by examining the historical development of the Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S. Southern Plains. While aquifers are celebrated for their capacity to help reclaim new territories, the persistent overextraction of the Ogallala reveals a wider inability to sustainably govern this resource. Through a close analysis of photographs documenting the first efforts to mine the Ogallala, this essay explores how visual representations of groundwater extraction helped construct a racialized and gendered subjectivity centered on white male ownership and stewardship. These images, produced as part of speculative property schemes, framed groundwater as a tool for transforming both the material and social landscape. By tracing how this ideology took root, this essay argues that groundwater’s seeming resistance to sustainable governance is not a product of its physical properties, but rather the outcome of historically constructed power relations and capitalist logics.