River Histories: Fishes, Floods and the Transformation of Freshwater Ecosystems

Catalog description

As food sources and transportation routes, rivers have long played important roles in human societies, and people have in turn transformed them. Most river histories explore the lives of people living along rivers, but this course will seek to look into the waters and understand how human activity has transformed aquatic ecosystems of rivers and adjoining wetlands. What were the effects of humans constraining rivers within levees, blocking them with dams, and clearing forests from their watersheds to make farmland? The class will also consider transportation, water power, flood mitigation, and conflicts between farmers, fishers, and industrialists over how to use rivers. We will focus on three particularly well-studied rivers, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, and the Rhine (including the Netherlands), though students are encouraged to do research projects of the river of their choice.