| dc.description.abstract | Residents of the nineteenth-century Connecticut River Valley learned the character of the river, and water more broadly, through their labor. Whether they encountered water in the process of farming, shipping, industrial production, or land reclamation, it challenged them to understand its power as both an object outside their control and a tool that facilitated their work. This awareness of water's autonomy and agency necessitated attention to how water's flow varied across timescales ranging from seasons, through historical precedents in working with water, and into the geological processes whereby the river shaped the contours of the Connecticut River floodplain and the valley as a whole. Communities mobilized this knowledge when explaining the limitations that ought to circumscribe novel water uses and trying to maintain the river's status as a common tool shared among diverse bodies of users. This converted working knowledge of water's flow into a political tool that both criticized and shaped industrialization. This dissertation asks how people knew the river as a common resource shared between independent communities and how the deployment of this knowledge—and the attendant political power that it carried—shaped the character of industrialization in the valley. It uses sources ranging from weather diaries to corporate records and municipal petitions to uncover patterns of local knowledge about water use and explore their influence on the politics of industrialization between 1790 and 1870. The temporalities that people saw underlying geological, and seasonal variations in the flow of water on the landscape, shaped how they responded to interventions on the landscape such as the construction of dams or bridges, alterations to the channel, or changes to drainage. When assessing these proposals, people looked beyond the immediately visible consequences of these interventions on the landscape. Understanding how water had flowed in the past helped people to imagine how it might flow in the future, and this imaginative viewpoint on the landscape shaped everything from farming practices to the design of water power dams in the nineteenth century valley. To document these accounts of the flow of water in everyday life, this dissertation uses a variety of sources. When accounting for individual perspectives on the flow of water, it looks at weather diaries—which used the flow of water as a heuristic tool for understanding seasonal change. When accounting for societal perspectives, it folds in accounts of the valley's physical geography—which relied on information from ordinary people who understood water's power as a geological force. When examining the political ramifications of these perspectives, it uses petitions, legal complaints, and corporate records to understand how knowledge of seasonal and geological processes shaped the historical transformation of the river. With all of these sources, this dissertation uncovers patterns of local knowledge about water use and explores their deployment in the politics of industrialization and urbanization. Ideas about water in the nineteenth-century Connecticut River Valley reveal the practices and politics of water use alongside how it shaped people's lives in practical ways. Their efforts at stewarding human entanglements with the landscape emerged from a perspective that envisioned a popular alternative to river engineering. Attending to how encounters with the landscape shaped perspectives on temporality provides a means of understanding how valley residents understood their river and its floodplain. In addition to its role in forming an environmental politics that shaped industrialization, treating public perspectives on rivers as engines of temporality provides a means of critically assessing key concepts in river history including watersheds, flooding, and the commodification of water. | |
