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. While many histories explore the lives of people living along rivers, this course will move from the terrestrial realm into the aquatic realm to consider how fluvial ecosystems work, from the smallest microorganisms to large creatures like salmon and alligators. This will allow us to think about how rivers have changed over time as people blocked them with dams, built levees to stop them from flooding, or straightened them into shipping canals. The best documented members of fluvial ecosystems have usually been fish, so we will pay particular attention to histories of fishing. We will also discuss transportation, water power, flood mitigation, and fights between farmers, fishers, and industrialists over how rivers have been exploited.