In its natural condition the Sacramento Valley was a flood-ravaged region where an inland sea a hundred miles long regularly formed during the rainy season, to drain slowly away by the summer months. Today the Valley is marvelously productive, with a great capital city at its center, but only after a seventy-year struggle to devise and build an intricate thousand miles of levees and drains. Robert Kelley sets that battle within the encompassing national political culture, which produced, through the Republican and Democratic parties, widely diverging ideas about how best to reclaim the Valley from flood. He draws on approaches developed in the field of policy analysis to examine the relationship between American political culture and environmental policy-making. We find that the prolonged controversy over the Sacramento Valley illuminates American decision-making, then and now.
In its natural condition the Sacramento Valley was a flood-ravaged region where an inland sea a hundred miles long regularly formed during the rainy season, to drain slowly away by the summer months. Today the Valley is marvelously productive, with a grea
Inhoudsopgave
Foreword
Preface
1 The Sacramento Valley: Eden Invaded
2 The Interplay of American Political Culture and Reclamation Policy: The 1850s
3 The Failed Dream: The Swampland Commissioners Experiment, 1861-1868
4 Crisis on the Yuba and the Feather: The 1860s
5 The Struggle Begins: Sutter County in Siege, 1866-1875
6 Colusa. the Sacramento River. and the Argument over What to Do: 1850s-1870s
7 The Levee-Building Spiral Begins: 1867-1880
8 The Parks Dam War:The North and the South in Arms Again, 1871-1876
9 California Mobilizes for a New Assault on the Inland Sea: 1878-1880
10 The Great Drainage Act Fight and the Reversion to Flood Control Anarchy: 1880-1886
11 Reentry: 1886-1902
12 A Policy Context Transformed: The Progressive Era and the Revival of Planning, 1902-6
13 The New American State Drains the Inland Sea: The Sacramento Flood Control Project
Becomes Reality, 1907-1920
14 A Valley Transformed:1905-1986
15 Reflections: The Sacramento Valley as a Case Study in American Political Culture and
the Policy Process
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Over de auteur
Robert Kelley is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the author of The Shaping of the American Past and several other highly esteemed books.
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