Martin Melosi: Water in North American environmental history

the historical importance of water.Neither does this reviewer have to be convinced that water has been a major force in many developments and events of the past that historians better reckon with than ignore.And still, while browsing through the 281 pages, reading the 25 chapters and looking at the 36 illustrations in Martin Melosi's magnificent Water in North American History, the ubiquity, the significance, and the multi-faceted nature of water's ways are amazing.Water is stored behind gigantic dams, in swimming pools and drinking bottles.It flows through cities, bodies, landscapes and huge infrastructural devices.It can be contaminated, polluted, enriched and purified (again).Water is the source of life, power, fun, and sometimes death.It is endowed with material as well as aesthetic qualities.The water cycle connects (almost) every place of this earth and yet the distribution of water is highly uneven.It spills and leaks into places where it is not supposed to be and is being diverted to destinations it would never have reached on its own.It is difficult to ascertain what the bigger problem is: too much water or not enough of it.Martin Melosi's book is part of the series "Themes in Environmental History" that mostly aims at undergraduate history and environmental studies students.It tackles the versatility of water in eight sections, each of which contains two to four "water episodes" (2) of approximately 10 pages each, understood by the author as "departure points for discussion and the basis for starting conversations" rather than "comprehensive learning vehicles."(2) This is true insofar as the individual episodes resemble scholarly articles more than textbook chapters (the one exception being the lack of references).However, it is also a bit of an understatement since Melosi's vignettes often highlight key events, developments, technologies and practices in the water history of North America (not so much individuals though).It is particularly the arrangement of and the interaction between the "water episodes" which lends the book an encyclopedic quality.The three articles in the first part of the book that speaks about Indigenous peoples before contact are a case in point.Here, Melosi deals with the Hohokam in the American Southwest, the Aztecs in Central Mexico and the Inuit in Canada's arctic region, and their respective encounters with water.This approach allows him not only to cover, exemplarily, the entire geographic region of North