TY - JOUR
AU - Mergenthal, Rebekah M, K
AB - Amahia Mallea’s book, an admirable addition to urban environmental history, explores the changes and continuities in the relationship between the Missouri river and the Kansas Cities over the twentieth century. Following the path of scholars like Blake Gumprecht, Andrew Hurley, Ari Kelman, and Joel Tarr who explore the relationship between cities and their rivers, Mallea’s story “melds environmental and human agency” (p. 3) to show how Kansas Citians shaped the Missouri River and how it shaped them. Because Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, share the confluence of the Missouri and Kaw Rivers, Mallea has a unique opportunity to explore how urban jurisdictions overlapped and competed, as well as the impact of differing state regulations. Overall, Mallea illuminates how the “Economic River” was prioritized during the twentieth century, often at the expense of the “Healthy River” (p.10). While some public health officials worked diligently to promote the link between environmental and public health, boosters were generally more successful in their emphasis on barge traffic and flood control. Indeed, they more often won federal support for their ideas, such as with the Pick-Sloan Plan. A key element of Mallea’s story is to show that even though clean drinking water and sewage management were crucial to residents of the Kansas Cities (and other places), for most of the twentieth century there was rarely any broader oversight that prioritized or coordinated these aspects. Mallea’s book is structured around three concentric frames. She starts with a close focus on the Kansas Cities themselves, shifts to a regional view for the second section, and in the final section expands to the broader river basin. While this schematic can lead to occasional confusion for the reader, overall it enables Mallea to explore how watersheds are not confined to political boundaries yet are affected by them. For example, she explores the development of the “urban innards” (p.7) of the cities, including the struggle over sewage disposal in Turkey Creek, which ran only briefly through Kansas City, Missouri, yet picked up about half of that city’s sewage before it drained back toward Kansas. Thus, Mallea illustrates the “intertwined fates of the sister cities” (p. 110) and how there can be no clear distinction drawn between upstreamers and downstreamers because everyone is connected by the river. She ends the book with a plea to dechannelize the Missouri River, as that would work “with the river and not against it, and define wealth as good health—both human and environmental” (p. 245). Importantly, Mallea asks the reader to not only understand the choices that have been made and the impacts they have had, but also how we might move forward in a different direction. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Western History Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - A River in the City of Fountains: An Environmental History of Kansas City and the Missouri River. By Amahia Mallea
JF - Western Historical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/whq/whaa073
DA - 2020-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-river-in-the-city-of-fountains-an-environmental-history-of-kansas-rIZrvFkQaM
SP - 338
EP - 338
VL - 51
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -