Water and American Government

Donald Pisani's history of perhaps the boldest economic and social program ever undertaken in the United States--to reclaim and cultivate vast areas of previously unusable land across the country—shows in fascinating detail how ambitious government programs fall prey to the power of local interest groups and the federal system of governance itself. What began as the underwriting of a variety of projects to create family farms and farming communities had become by the 1930s a massive public works and regional development program, with an emphasis on the urban as much as on the rural West.

Donald J. Pisani is Merrick Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. His books include a previous history to which this one is a sequel, To Reclaim a Divided West (1992), as well as Water, Land, and Law in the West (1996) and From the Family Farm to Agribusiness (California, 1984).

List of Maps
Preface and Acknowledgments

1. Saving Lost Lives:
Irrigation and the Ideology of Homemaking

2. The Perils of Public Works:
Federal Reclamation, 1902–1909

3. Case Studies in Irrigation and Community:
Twin Falls and Rupert

4. An Administrative Morass:
Federal Reclamation, 1909–1917

5. Boom, Bust, and Boom:
Federal Reclamation, 1917–1935

6. Uneasy Allies:
The Reclamation Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs

7. Case Studies in Water and Power:
The Yakima and the Pima

8. Wiring the New West:
The Strange Career of Public Power

9. Gateway to the Hydraulic Age:
Water Politics, 1920–1935

10. Conclusion:

Retrospect and Significance
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Illustrations follow page 000.