It may be time to “de-territorialize historical narratives of the United States.”1 As the premise of this special issue demonstrates, American history has long been told through a land-centered lens—one that treats water as a backdrop or boundary. Yet when we shift perspective to view the U.S. past through water or the shifting interface between land and water, familiar narratives transform. In some instances, literature and film have offered ways of reorienting our perceptions by giving water prominence over land as a driving force behind such narratives. Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction classic Dune does just that (Figure 1). He centers attention on the fictional desert planet, Arrakis, as the axis of his story. This choice seems to place aridity and desolation at the heart of the book. As the only source of the highly coveted “spice”—a substance that can “bend space” to make galactic travel possible—Arrakis becomes a battleground for interstellar warfare. Below the surface of the planet, figuratively and literally, the indigenous population of desert-savvy Fremen stores untold quantities of water, contrary to the popular view that Fremen society is weak because it is environmentally vulnerable without a sufficient water supply. However, the potential of their water to remake Arrakis is their hidden power, possibly more so than the presence of spice.2

In 1927, the city of Santa Barbara, California, began construction of a rubble mound breakwater to create a protected yacht harbor. The initial breakwater was an L-shaped structure that left a gap between the short “arm” of the breakwater and the shore, and engineers believed this configuration would allow sand to continue its normal movement along the coast.1 The engineers who designed the structure acknowledged that, “The design of a harbor on a sandy coast is one of the most difficult problems of engineering.” They anticipated some shoaling of the harbor and erosion of the beach to the east, particularly during storms.2 Their report framed the breakwater as an experiment in which trial-and-error would lead to an ideal harbor for the city, but they downplayed both risks and costs involved, including projecting that “the annual cost for maintenance will be negligible.”3 This optimism would prove badly misguided, as sand almost immediately began to fill the new harbor.

Although you wouldn’t know it from reading the historiography, dredges played an essential role in expanding and retaining the American empire in the Pacific. Dredges built a string of ports on the Pacific Coast, from Seattle, WA to San Diego, CA. Dredges constructed seaports in Honolulu and Pearl Harbor in Hawai’i and Manila Bay in the Philippines. Dredges turned atolls and desert isles, such as Midway, Guam, and Wake, into a constellation of harbors for ships and seaplanes. In short, dredges literally built the infrastructure of the empire.1

Histories of American water have tended to flow in two dimensions, tracing surface waters across horizontal space and only rarely descending into the earth below. Rivers, wetlands, dams, and canals have defined how we understand our relationship with this vital resource, and with the diverse human and more-than-human actors who share it. Foundational works by Donald Worster and Norris Hundley traced the rise of hydraulic societies in the American West, showing how rivers, dams, and aqueducts enabled both state formation and capitalist expansion, while Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi foregrounded water infrastructure in the field of urban environmental history.1 More recent scholarship has explored cultural and social histories of water, including more-than-human perspectives, environmental justice, Indigenous water rights, and the political ecologies of urban and rural water systems, expanding the field well beyond its earlier focus on engineering and state-building.2

Before the planters arrived, the Mississippi River Delta was a swampy jungle. In his 1941 memoir Lanterns on the Levee, William Alexander Percy, a prominent member of the regional plantation elite, described what the Delta might have looked like in those early days, with an emphasis on the area’s fluid nature. “A still country it must have been then, ankle-deep in water, mostly in shadow, with mere flickers of sunshine, and they motey and yellow and thick like syrup.”1 But in the early nineteenth century, news had started to spread about the fertility of the Delta soil. The younger sons of plantation families in the eastern states, looking for new land to plant staple crops, began to move west, turning the Deep South of the United States into the vertex of the cotton frontier. In Mississippi they settled near the river, which provided transportation, information, and recreation, in the form of leisure trips to New Orleans. “The real highway was the river,” Percy wrote in his personal history of the Mississippi Delta. The steamer Pargo regularly arrived on Sunday mornings in the Delta town of Greenville. Most people would be in church then, but when the Pargo’s whistle blew, the men immediately stood up from the pews and made for the riverfront, to hear the latest news and gossips.2 Knowledge was an important cargo aboard riverboats like the Pargo.3