The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics. In this pioneering study, White explores the relationship between the natural history of the Columbia River and the human history of the Pacific Northwest for both whites and Native Americans. He concentrates on what brings humans and the river together: not only the physical space of the region but also, and primarily, energy and work. For working with the river has been central to Pacific Northwesterners' competing ways of life. It is in this way that White comes to view the Columbia River as an organic machine--with conflicting human and natural claims--and to show that whatever separation exists between humans and nature exists to be crossed.

The Pacific Northwest holds an abundance of resources for energy production, from hydroelectric power to coal, nuclear power, wind turbines, and even solar panels. But hydropower is king. Dams on the Columbia, Snake, Fraser, Kootenay, and dozens of other rivers provided the foundation for an expanding, regionally integrated power system in the U.S. Northwest and British Columbia. A broad historical synthesis chronicling the region's first century of electrification, Paul Hirt's new study reveals how the region's citizens struggled to build a power system that was technologically efficient, financially profitable, and socially and environmentally responsible. Hirt shows that every energy source comes with its share of costs and benefits. Because Northwest energy development meant river development, the electric power industry collided with the salmon fishing industry and the treaty rights of Northwest indigenous peoples from the 1890s to the present. Because U.S. federal agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built many of the large dams in the region, a significant portion of the power supply is publicly owned, initiating contentious debates over how that power should best serve the citizens of the region. Hirt dissects these ongoing battles, evaluating the successes and failures of regional efforts to craft an efficient yet socially just power system. Focusing on the dynamics of problem-solving, governance, and the tense relationship between profit-seeking and the public interest, Hirt's narrative takes in a wide range of players-not only on the consumer side, where electricity transformed mills, mines, households, commercial districts, urban transit, factories, and farms, but also power companies operating at the local and regional level, and investment companies that financed and in some cases parasitized the operators. His study also straddles the international border. It is the first book to compare energy development in the U.S. Northwest and British Columbia. Both engaging and balanced in its treatment of all the actors on this expansive stage, The Wired Northwest helps us better understand the challenges of the twenty-first century, as we try to learn from past mistakes and re-design an energy grid for a more sustainable future.

Accolades freely and frequently lavished on Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project included “The Biggest Thing on Earth!” “The Eighth Wonder of the World!” and “The Largest Reclamation Project Ever Undertaken!” They highlight a monumental construction effort that spanned the 1930s through the 1980s. Now, for the first time, the story of this gigantic undertaking is told in this definitive history. When completed, the eleven-million-cubic-yard monolith at Grand Coulee on the Columbia River in north central Washington became the largest single block of concrete ever laid and provided an abundance of electricity that helped win World War II. Still one of the world's largest energy-producing stations, it is at the heart of a dynamic power grid that supplies all of the western United States with energy. The product of a long struggle over how to irrigate the Columbia Basin, Grand Coulee Dam resulted from the visions of eastern Washington residents, people like Wenatchee editor Rufus Woods and members of the Spokane Chamber of Commerce, who saw the undertaking as a dynamic plan to bring prosperity to their region. Yet today the reclamation enterprise--more than half a century after construction began--stands only half finished. Its future depends on the nation's need for food and the willingness of the public to pay the rapidly spiraling economic and environmental costs associated with such large-scale irrigation plans. The fight for Grand Coulee Dam, and the story of its construction, is a vital and animated saga of people striving for dazzling goals and then working, often against both each other and nature, to build something spectacular. They accomplished their goal against the backdrop of the worst economic depression in the nation's history. The dam, and the extensive irrigation network it supports, stands today as a monument to their dreams and their labors.

The engineering ideas behind key twentieth-century technical innovations, from great dams and highways to the jet engine, the transistor, the microchip, and the computer. Technology is essential to modern life, yet few of us are technology-literate enough to know much about the engineering that underpins it. In this book, David P. Billington, Jr., offers accessible accounts of the key twentieth-century engineering innovations that brought us into the twenty-first century. Billington examines a series of engineering advances--from Hoover Dam and jet engines to the transistor, the microchip, the computer, and the internet--and explains how they came about and how they work.