OLD MAN RIVER: THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER IN NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY by Paul Schneider
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Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History by Paul Schneider
The Mississippi begins life uneventfully as a trickle seeping out of Lake Itasca, near the Canadian border. By the time the river enters the Gulf of Mexico it has gathered together the waters of nearly 40 percent of the continental United States.
Long before the Europeans arrived, native cultures rose and fell in the watershed. Among early mysteries examined here are the ancient effigy mounds -- earth art modeled after serpents, birds, and bears -- some hundreds of feet in length, and Cahokia, the greatest pre-Columbian city on the continent, which flourished near the majestic river in the centuries preceding the arrival of sixteenth century Europeans. Though stylistically different -- the Spanish explorers came on horseback from the south, the French, from the north, in native canoes -- the goal was the same: conquest and mastery of the watershed. Their names -- de Soto, Marquette and Joliet, the incomparable La Salle -- and the hardships endured quicken the pulse of today's reader.
George Washington fought his first battle in an effort to secure the watershed, and Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman both came to President Lincoln's attention after their wartime successes on the Mississippi.
Mark Twain is known as the bard of the Mississippi, but Melville, Dickens, Trollope, and Audubon also wrote about the river. Pirates and river rats, gamblers and slaves, hustlers and landscape painters, loggers and catfishers, tourists and missionaries: it is a river of stories and myth. It's Paul Robeson sitting on a cotton bail, Daniel Boone floating on a flatboat, and Paul Bunyan cutting trees in the neighborhood of Little House in the Big Woods.
Half devastated product of American ingenuity, half magnificent natural wonder, it is impossible to imagine America without the Mississippi.
Henry Holt, Hardcover, 2013
This is a BRAND NEW book.
The Mississippi begins life uneventfully as a trickle seeping out of Lake Itasca, near the Canadian border. By the time the river enters the Gulf of Mexico it has gathered together the waters of nearly 40 percent of the continental United States.
Long before the Europeans arrived, native cultures rose and fell in the watershed. Among early mysteries examined here are the ancient effigy mounds -- earth art modeled after serpents, birds, and bears -- some hundreds of feet in length, and Cahokia, the greatest pre-Columbian city on the continent, which flourished near the majestic river in the centuries preceding the arrival of sixteenth century Europeans. Though stylistically different -- the Spanish explorers came on horseback from the south, the French, from the north, in native canoes -- the goal was the same: conquest and mastery of the watershed. Their names -- de Soto, Marquette and Joliet, the incomparable La Salle -- and the hardships endured quicken the pulse of today's reader.
George Washington fought his first battle in an effort to secure the watershed, and Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman both came to President Lincoln's attention after their wartime successes on the Mississippi.
Mark Twain is known as the bard of the Mississippi, but Melville, Dickens, Trollope, and Audubon also wrote about the river. Pirates and river rats, gamblers and slaves, hustlers and landscape painters, loggers and catfishers, tourists and missionaries: it is a river of stories and myth. It's Paul Robeson sitting on a cotton bail, Daniel Boone floating on a flatboat, and Paul Bunyan cutting trees in the neighborhood of Little House in the Big Woods.
Half devastated product of American ingenuity, half magnificent natural wonder, it is impossible to imagine America without the Mississippi.
Henry Holt, Hardcover, 2013
This is a BRAND NEW book.
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