Water and American Government

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.

Pisani Donald J. :

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).