New Publication: “A Water’s History of the United States” — Special Issue of Modern American History
RIAS researchers Gaetano Di Tommaso and Dario Fazzi have guest-edited the March 2026 special issue of Modern American History, published open access by Cambridge University Press.
Our RIAS colleagues Gaetano Di Tommaso and Dario Fazzi have guest-edited a special issue of Modern American History, published by Cambridge University Press in April 2026. Titled “A Water’s History of the United States,” the issue brings together a rich collection of essays, many of which grew out of the papers presented at the international conference of the same name that the RIAS co-organized with the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University and the Netherlands American Studies Association in Middelburg in May 2025.
Together, the contributions offer bold and thought-provoking reflections on the ever-shifting relationship between American power and bodies of water, while also illuminating the far-reaching consequences of the growing U.S. global influence for planetary water resources. Ranging across urban waste and hydrology, infrastructure and migration, dredging and empire, groundwater and aquifers, rivers and coastal communities, the issue highlights water as an active force in U.S. history rather than a backdrop to national development.
The issue opens with a Soapbox essay by Di Tommaso and Fazzi, which invites readers to rethink American history — its periodizations, protagonists, and underlying dynamics — through the lens of water and its fundamental role in shaping modern America. Drawing on blue humanities scholarship, the essay positions the United States as a key driver and emblematic case of the “blue acceleration,” and argues that a water-centered approach reveals how water availability and management extended state power, created sacrifice zones, fostered uneven development, and continue to test American democracy.
About the editors
Gaetano Di Tommaso is Academic Coordinator and Researcher at the RIAS, where his work focuses on fossil fuels, natural resources, and the environmental history of the modern United States. Dario Fazzi is RIAS Professor of Transatlantic Environmental History at Leiden University, and the author, most recently, of Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Read the issue
The special issue is open access. Read the full issue on Cambridge Core.
Photo: “US rivers in the contiguous 48” by Nelson Minar, CC BY-SA 2.0 Modified (colors)
