Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935

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University of California Press, 2002 M12 31 - 408 pages
Donald Pisani's history of perhaps the boldest economic and social program ever undertaken in the United States--to reclaim and cultivate vast areas of previously unusable land across the country—shows in fascinating detail how ambitious government programs fall prey to the power of local interest groups and the federal system of governance itself. What began as the underwriting of a variety of projects to create family farms and farming communities had become by the 1930s a massive public works and regional development program, with an emphasis on the urban as much as on the rural West.

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Contents

Irrigation and the Ideology of Homemaking
1
Federal Reclamation 19021909
32
Twin Falls and Rupert
65
Federal Reclamation 19091917
96
Federal Reclamation 19171935
123
The Reclamation Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs
154
Illustrations
180
The Yakima and the Pima
181
The Strange Career of Public Power
202
Water Politics 19201935
235
Retrospect and Significance
272
ABBREVIATIONS
297
NOTES
299
INDEX
389
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About the author (2002)

Donald J. Pisani is Merrick Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. His books include a previous history to which this one is a sequel, To Reclaim a Divided West (1992), as well as Water, Land, and Law in the West (1996) and From the Family Farm to Agribusiness (California, 1984).

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