Frances F. Dunwell. The Hudson: America's River. Columbia
University Press, 2008. 320. $29.95 (paper), ISBN
978-0-231-13641-9. Reviewed by Matthew Evenden Published on
H-Environment (April, 2009) Commissioned by Charles-François
Mathis Celebrating America’s River Of all the units chosen for
analysis by environmental historians, the river basin or
watershed must be one of the most common. Some of the defining
titles of the subdiscipline, from Donald Worster’s Rivers of
Empire (1985) to Richard White’s Organic Machine (1995), focus
principally on rivers and how people interact with them. These
works have made important contributions to scholarship, pushing
debates in new directions, and not only about rivers. If, to
paraphrase Claude Levi-Strauss, rivers are good to think with,
then this is because they touch on so many of the problems and
concerns of environmental historians. Environmental histories of
rivers also command public attention in a way that thematic
studies rarely do. Both Worster and White’s books