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Thousand-Year Flood
A01=David Welky
adventure
adversity
Author_David Welky
cairo
Category=NHK
Category=RNR
class
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
extreme weather
farming
fdr
flood
floodplain management
floodwaters
government
great depression
history
louisville
martial law
mississippi
natural disaster
new deal
nonfiction
ohio river
policy
politics
poverty
race
racism
red cross
refugee camps
relief
roosevelt
sandbags
settlement
shawneetown
storm
valley
waterways
Product details
- ISBN 9780226887166
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 15 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 30 Sep 2011
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
David Welky is associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas and the author of Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression and The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II.
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