Download or read book Rising Tide written by John M. Barry and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America.
Download or read book The Flood Year 1927 written by Susan Scott Parrish and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly nuanced cultural history of the Great Mississippi flood The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, drowning crops and displacing more than half a million people across seven states. It was also the first environmental disaster to be experienced virtually on a mass scale. The Flood Year 1927 draws from newspapers, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, vaudeville, blues songs, poetry, and fiction to show how this event provoked an intense and lasting cultural response. Americans at first seemed united in what Herbert Hoover called a "great relief machine," but deep rifts soon arose. Southerners, pointing to faulty federal levee design, decried the attack of Yankee water. The condition of African American evacuees prompted comparisons to slavery from pundits like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. And environmentalists like Gifford Pinchot called the flood "the most colossal blunder in civilized history." Susan Scott Parrish examines how these and other key figures—from entertainers Will Rogers, Miller & Lyles, and Bessie Smith to authors Sterling Brown, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright—shaped public awareness and collective memory of the event. The crises of this period that usually dominate historical accounts are war and financial collapse, but The Flood Year 1927 allows us to assess how mediated environmental disasters became central to modern consciousness.
Download or read book Deep n as it Come written by Pete Daniel and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 1977-01-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spring and summer of 1927, the Mississippi River and its tributaries flooded from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Gulf of Mexico, tearing through seven states, sometimes spreading out to nearly one hundred miles across. Pete Daniel's Deep'n as It Come, available again in a new format, chronicles the worst flood in the history of the South and re-creates, with extraordinary immediacy, the Mississippi River's devastating assault on property and lives. Daniel weaves his narrative with newspaper and firsthand accounts, interviews with survivors, official reports, and over 140 contemporary photographs. The story of the common refugee who suffered most from the effects of the flood emerges alongside the details of the massive rescue and relief operation - one of the largest ever mounted in the United States. The title, Deep'n as It Come, is a phrase from Cora Lee Campbell's earthy description of the approaching water, which, Daniel writes, "moved at a pace of some fourteen miles per day," and, in its movement and sound, "had the eeriness of a full eclipse of the sun, unsettling, chilling." "The contradictions of sorrow and humor,... death and salvation, despair and hope, calm and panic - all reveal the human dimension" in this compassionate and unforgettable portrait of common people confronting a great natural disaster.
Download or read book Backwater Blues written by Richard M. Mizelle Jr. and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mississippi River flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, reshaping the social and cultural landscape as well as the physical environment. Often remembered as an event that altered flood control policy and elevated the stature of powerful politicians, Richard M. Mizelle Jr. examines the place of the flood within African American cultural memory and the profound ways it influenced migration patterns in the United States. In Backwater Blues, Mizelle analyzes the disaster through the lenses of race and charity, blues music, and mobility and labor. The book’s title comes from Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” perhaps the best-known song about the flood. Mizelle notes that the devastation produced the richest groundswell of blues recordings following any environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, with more than fifty songs by countless singers evoking the disruptive force of the flood and the precariousness of the levees originally constructed to protect citizens. Backwater Blues reveals larger relationships between social and environmental history. According to Mizelle, musicians, Harlem Renaissance artists, fraternal organizations, and Creole migrants all shared a sense of vulnerability in the face of both the Mississippi River and a white supremacist society. As a result, the Mississippi flood of 1927 was not just an environmental crisis but a racial event. Challenging long-standing ideas of African American environmental complacency, Mizelle offers insights into the broader dynamics of human interactions with nature as well as ways in which nature is mediated through the social and political dynamics of race.Includes discography.
Download or read book Flood written by Kathleen Duey and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rushing river with rapidly rising waters threatens the lives—and life savings—of two resourceful kids in this thrilling tale of historical fiction, part of the Survivors series. For years, Garret and Molly have dreamed of seeing more of the world than cotton fields and the dusty poverty of their Mississippi Delta farms. They’ve been stashing away hard-earned pennies and nickels in a tin-can bank, hidden deep in the bayou. Now rising flood waters threaten the hiding place of their money, and they set out on their homemade raft to retrieve it. But the raging Mississippi has other plans, and suddenly Garrett and Molly find themselves in a deadly battle with the dangerous currents and roiling rapids of their debris-strewn river—fighting not for their life savings, but for their lives.
Download or read book Father Mississippi written by Lyle Saxon and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Tilted World written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the backdrop of the historic flooding of the Mississippi River, The Tilted World is an extraordinary tale of murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, and a man and a woman who find unexpected love, from Tom Franklin, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, and award-winning poet Beth Ann Fennelly The year is 1927. As rains swell the Mississippi, the mighty river threatens to burst its banks and engulf everything in its path, including federal revenue agent Ted Ingersoll and his partner, Ham Johnson. Arriving in the tiny hamlet of Hobnob, Mississippi, to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents who'd been on the trail of a local bootlegger, they are astonished to find a baby boy abandoned in the middle of a crime scene. Ingersoll, an orphan raised by nuns, is determined to find the infant a home, and his search leads him to Dixie Clay Holliver. A strong woman married too young to a philandering charmer, Dixie Clay has lost a child to illness and is powerless to resist this second chance at motherhood. From the moment they meet, Ingersoll and Dixie Clay are drawn to each other. He has no idea that she's the best bootlegger in the county and may be connected to the agents' disappearance. And while he seems kind and gentle, Dixie Clay knows full well that he is an enemy who can never be trusted. When Ingersoll learns that a saboteur might be among them, planning a catastrophe along the river that would wreak havoc in Hobnob, he knows that he and Dixie Clay will face challenges and choices that they will be fortunate to survive. Written with extraordinary insight and tenderness, The Tilted World is that rarest of creations, a story of seemingly ordinary people who find hope and deliverance where they least expect it—in each other.
Download or read book Disaster Response and Appointment of a Recovery Czar written by Kevin R. Kosar and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2011-04 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the destruction caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the press has looked to the past for examples of fed. responses to natural disasters that might serve as models for emulation today. The fed. response to the flood of 1927 featured Sec. of Commerce Herbert Hoover as the director of the flood response and wielding immense executive powers. This report describes the flood of 1927, and assesses the fed. government¿s response. Pres. Calvin Coolidge created a quasi-governmental commission that included members of his Cabinet and the Red Cross. This commission encouraged the public to donate funds to the relief effort and gave Hoover near-absolute authority to organize and oversee its response. A print on demand report.
Download or read book Lanterns On The Levee written by William Alexander Percy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-09-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, within the shelter of old traditions, aristocratic in the best sense, William Alexander Percy in his lifetime (1885–1942) was brought face to face with the convulsions of a changing world. Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood. In describing life in the Mississippi Delta, Percy bridges the interval between the semifeudal South of the 1800s and the anxious South of the early 1940s. The rare qualities of this classic memoir lie not in what Will Percy did in his life—although his life was exciting and varied—but rather in the intimate, honest, and soul-probing record of how he brought himself to contemplate unflinchingly a new and unstable era. The 1973 introduction by Walker Percy—Will's nephew and adopted son—recalls the strong character and easy grace of "the most extraordinary man I have ever known."
Download or read book Mississippi River Tragedies written by Christine A. Klein and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read a free excerpt here! American engineers have done astounding things to bend the Mississippi River to their will: forcing one of its tributaries to flow uphill, transforming over a thousand miles of roiling currents into a placid staircase of water, and wresting the lower half of the river apart from its floodplain. American law has aided and abetted these feats. But despite our best efforts, so-called “natural disasters” continue to strike the Mississippi basin, as raging floodwaters decimate waterfront communities and abandoned towns literally crumble into the Gulf of Mexico. In some places, only the tombstones remain, leaning at odd angles as the underlying soil erodes away. Mississippi River Tragedies reveals that it is seductively deceptive—but horribly misleading—to call such catastrophes “natural.” Authors Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer present a sympathetic account of the human dreams, pride, and foibles that got us to this point, weaving together engaging historical narratives and accessible law stories drawn from actual courtroom dramas. The authors deftly uncover the larger story of how the law reflects and even amplifies our ambivalent attitude toward nature—simultaneously revering wild rivers and places for what they are, while working feverishly to change them into something else. Despite their sobering revelations, the authors’ final message is one of hope. Although the acknowledgement of human responsibility for unnatural disasters can lead to blame, guilt, and liability, it can also prod us to confront the consequences of our actions, leading to a liberating sense of possibility and to the knowledge necessary to avoid future disasters.
Download or read book The Thousand Year Flood written by David Welky and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early days of 1937, the Ohio River, swollen by heavy winter rains, began rising. And rising. And rising. By the time the waters crested, the Ohio and Mississippi had climbed to record heights. Nearly four hundred people had died, while a million more had run from their homes. The deluge caused more than half a billion dollars of damage at a time when the Great Depression still battered the nation. Timed to coincide with the flood's seventy-fifth anniversary, The Thousand-Year Flood is the first comprehensive history of one of the most destructive disasters in American history. David Welky first shows how decades of settlement put Ohio valley farms and towns at risk and how politicians and planners repeatedly ignored the dangers. Then he tells the gripping story of the river's inexorable rise: residents fled to refugee camps and higher ground, towns imposed martial law, prisoners rioted, Red Cross nurses endured terrifying conditions, and FDR dispatched thousands of relief workers. In a landscape fraught with dangers—from unmoored gas tanks that became floating bombs to powerful currents of filthy floodwaters that swept away whole towns—people hastily raised sandbag barricades, piled into overloaded rowboats, and marveled at water that stretched as far as the eye could see. In the flood's aftermath, Welky explains, New Deal reformers, utopian dreamers, and hard-pressed locals restructured not only the flood-stricken valleys, but also the nation's relationship with its waterways, changes that continue to affect life along the rivers to this day. A striking narrative of danger and adventure—and the mix of heroism and generosity, greed and pettiness that always accompany disaster—The Thousand-Year Flood breathes new life into a fascinating yet little-remembered American story.
Download or read book The End of the River written by Simon Winchester and published by Scribd, Inc.. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to climate-change-inspired threats, it is rising sea levels we hear most about. But if the oceans are, as Herman Melville put it, “the tide-beating heart of the earth,” rivers are its circulatory system. In the United States, there is no river more storied, symbolic, and vital than the Mississippi, and none, to use Mark Twain’s word, more lawless. The struggle to control it has been going on nearly as long as there has been human civilization on its banks, and the attendant drama and dangers have been memorialized by many writers, among them Twain and, in his seminal 1987 New Yorker account, John McPhee. Now Simon Winchester, the consummate, critically acclaimed storyteller and bestselling author of Atlantic and The Professor and the Madman, turns his eye to what could well be the height of the battle, one increasingly doomed by man’s interference. The most fateful instance of this interference was accomplished by an inventor and steamboat captain, Henry Miller Shreve, in the nineteenth century. In vivid detail, Winchester re-creates the smashing and digging and the great man- and steam power that Shreve wielded to clear the river of snags and logjams and, in order to shorten the passage to New Orleans, carve an entirely new channel for it. What no one foresaw was that his celebrated shortcut, Shreve’s Cut, would form a sloping chute to an adjacent river, the Atchafalaya, and, aided by gravity and shifting weather patterns, increasingly tempt the waters of the Mississippi in its direction. Resisting this trend with ever more ingenious methods (and ever more expense) began just after, first with a system of levees, then with added spillways, and, finally, with the conception and construction of a floodgate system, the Old River Control Structure, still in place today. And the stakes are high: If—many say when—the Atchafalaya captures the Mississippi’s stream, it will be the end of life as it’s currently known in the American South. The great cities of Louisiana—New Orleans and Baton Rouge—would be rendered fetid swamps; entire sections of the American infrastructure, from pipelines to electricity and water supply, would collapse. Homes would be displaced and livelihoods, if not lives, would be lost. Deftly combining the hydrological and the historical, Winchester tours the challenges that upped the ante on the Mississippi River Commission’s duty to protect the watershed and its inhabitants: the upheavals that came in the form of the Great Flood of 1927, one of the most destructive natural disasters of all time, displacing more people than almost any event in American history, and the record-breaking inundations of 1937 and 1973. He pays tribute to the Army Corps of Engineers, for their Herculean efforts to keep the river on its current track, and to one civilian, Albert Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein, a hydraulic engineer and one of the main architects of the mighty control structure that continues to divide the Mississippi from the Atchafalaya. But how long can it hold in a time when extremes of weather are the norm, when storms come faster and more furiously, sending sediment-loaded water pounding against the floodgates—events that not only pit man against nature but, given that we cannot always agree which causes and correctives to pursue, man against man? In this elegant synthesis of past and present, the exigencies of the natural world and the human, Winchester offers an engrossing cautionary tale that readers cannot afford to ignore. It is a call to arms that asks whether accepting defeat—letting nature take its course—may be the only way to win.
Download or read book Katrina written by Andy Horowitz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bancroft Prize Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year “The main thrust of Horowitz’s account is to make us understand Katrina—the civic calamity, not the storm itself—as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature.” —Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back nearly a century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers made it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than for African Americans. He explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana’s oil industry have been distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today. “Masterful...Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we’re willing—and unwilling—to protect.” —New York Review of Books “If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Download or read book Power Plays Politics Football and Other Blood Sports written by and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barry, award-winning author of "
Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
Download or read book Hurricane Katrina written by James Patterson Smith and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the fullest account yet written of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Rooted in a wealth of oral histories, it tells the dramatic but underreported story of a people who confronted the unprecedented devastation of sixty-five-thousand homes when the eye wall and powerful northeast quadrant of the hurricane swept a record thirty-foot storm surge across a seventy-five-mile stretch of unprotected Mississippi towns and cities. James Patterson Smith takes us through life and death accounts of storm day, August 29, 2005, and the precarious days of food and water shortages that followed. Along the way the narrative treats us to inspiring episodes of neighborly compassion and creative responses to the greatest natural disaster in American history. The heroes of this saga are the local people and local officials. In often moving accounts, the book addresses the Mississippi Gulf Coast's long struggle to remove a record-setting volume of debris and get on with the rebuilding of homes, schools, jobs, and public infrastructure. Along the way readers are offered insights into the politics of recovery funding and the bureaucratic bungling and hubris that afflicted the storm response and complicated and delayed the work of recovery. Still, there are ample accounts of things done well, and a moving chapter gives us a feel for the psychological, spiritual, and material impact of the eight hundred thousand people from across the nation who gave of themselves as volunteers in the Mississippi recovery effort.
Download or read book The Great Influenza written by John M. Barry and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-10-04 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 New York Times bestseller “Barry will teach you almost everything you need to know about one of the deadliest outbreaks in human history.”—Bill Gates "Monumental... an authoritative and disturbing morality tale."—Chicago Tribune The strongest weapon against pandemic is the truth. Read why in the definitive account of the 1918 Flu Epidemic. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. As Barry concludes, "The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that...those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart." At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.
