Anthony E. Carlson is professor of history at the School of Advanced Military Studies, US Army Command and General Staff College.

“A particularly prescient history of wetlands, swamps, and other watery landscapes in early America as historians and the public grapple with the intertwined questions of environmental justice, Indigenous dispossession, and settler colonial capitalism in the era of human-induced climate threats.”—John William Nelson, author of Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent“Drainage is clearly one of the leading stories of American environmental history, and few people know much about it. Carlson succeeds in unearthing the story, exploring its contested institutional and legal history and illuminating rural power struggles, political structures, and conflicts between individualism and collectivism.”—Robert Michael Morrissey, author of People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America

Anthony E. Carlson is professor of history at the School of Advanced Military Studies, US Army Command and General Staff College.

“A particularly prescient history of wetlands, swamps, and other watery landscapes in early America as historians and the public grapple with the intertwined questions of environmental justice, Indigenous dispossession, and settler colonial capitalism in the era of human-induced climate threats.”—John William Nelson, author of Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent“Drainage is clearly one of the leading stories of American environmental history, and few people know much about it. Carlson succeeds in unearthing the story, exploring its contested institutional and legal history and illuminating rural power struggles, political structures, and conflicts between individualism and collectivism.”—Robert Michael Morrissey, author of People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America

Anthony E. Carlson is professor of history at the School of Advanced Military Studies, US Army Command and General Staff College.

“A particularly prescient history of wetlands, swamps, and other watery landscapes in early America as historians and the public grapple with the intertwined questions of environmental justice, Indigenous dispossession, and settler colonial capitalism in the era of human-induced climate threats.”—John William Nelson, author of Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent“Drainage is clearly one of the leading stories of American environmental history, and few people know much about it. Carlson succeeds in unearthing the story, exploring its contested institutional and legal history and illuminating rural power struggles, political structures, and conflicts between individualism and collectivism.”—Robert Michael Morrissey, author of People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America