In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation approving the construction of the O’Shaughnessy Dam to inundate the Hetch Hetchy Valley inside Yosemite National Park. This decision concluded a decade-long, highly contentious debate over the dam-and-reservoir complex to supply water to post-earthquake San Francisco, a battle that was dramatic, unsettling, and consequential. Hetch Hetchy: A History in Documents captures the tensions animating the long-running controversy and places them in their historical context. Key to understanding the debate is the prior and violent dispossession of Indigenous Nations from the valley they had stewarded for thousands of years. Their removal by the mid-nineteenth century enabled white elite tourism to take over, setting the stage for the subsequent debate for and against the dam in the early twentieth century. That debate contained a Faustian bargain: to secure an essential water supply for San Francisco meant the destruction of the valley that John Muir and others praised so highly. This contentious situation continues to reverberate, as interest groups now battle over whether to tear down the dam and restore the valley. Hetch Hetchy remains a dramatic flashpoint in American environmental culture.

In the wake of the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, the city of San Francisco desperately needed reliable supplies of water and electricity. Its mayor, James Phelan, pressed for the damming of the Tuolumne River in the newly created Yosemite National Park, setting off a firestorm of protest. For the first time in American history, a significant national opposition arose to defend and preserve nature, led by John Muir and the Sierra Club, who sought to protect what they believed was the right of all Americans to experience natural beauty, particularly the magnificent mountains of the Yosemite region. Yet the defenders of the valley, while opposing the creation of a dam and reservoir, did not intend for it to be maintained as wilderness. Instead they advocated a different kind of development--the building of roads, hotels, and an infrastructure to support recreational tourism. Using articles, pamphlets, and broadsides, they successfully whipped up public opinion against the dam. Letters from individuals began to pour into Congress by the thousands, and major newspapers published editorials condemning the dam. The fight went to the floor of Congress, where politicians debated the value of scenery and the costs of western development. Ultimately, passage of the passage of the Raker Act in 1913 by Congress granted San Francisco the right to flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley. A decade later the O'Shaughnessy Dam, the second largest civil engineering project of its day after the Panama Canal, was completed. Yet conflict continued over the ownership of the watershed and the profits derived from hydroelectrocity. To this day the reservoir provides San Francisco with a pure and reliable source of drinking water and an important source of power. Although the Sierra Club lost this battle, the controversy stirred the public into action on behalf of national parks. Future debates over dams and restoration clearly demonstrated the burgeoning strength of grassroots environmentalism. In a narrative peopled by politicians and business leaders, engineers and laborers, preservationists and ordinary citizens, Robert W. Righter tells the epic story of the first major environmental battle of the twentieth century, which reverberates to this day.

When Parliament sought to raise funds through the passing of the Stamp Act in 1765, they did not anticipate the protests and staunch opposition to the new law that would ensue in the colonies. Though the crisis was eventually resolved, the larger questions raised by Parliament’s action and colonial resistance remained unanswered. What started as a debate over taxation would end in a struggle for independence. The Stamp Act Crisis, 1765–1766, marks the transition in United States history from the Colonial Era to the Era of the American Revolution. The full narrative of the Stamp Act includes political, social, economic, and cultural histories on both sides of the Atlantic. This volume provides the reader with the opportunity to engage with the pamphlets, letters, speeches, legal documents, and other texts and images that people in the colonies and in London were themselves reading, debating, and reacting to at the time. The introduction incorporates recent scholarship and provides a fresh look at this key moment in American history, and the informative headnotes and rich annotations help orient the reader within the historical sources.

Conservation was the first nationwide political movement in American history to grapple with environmental problems like waste, pollution, resource exhaustion, and sustainability. At its height, the conservation movement was a critical aspect of the broader reforms undertaken in the Progressive Era (1890-1910), as the rapidly industrializing nation struggled to protect human health, natural beauty, and "national efficiency." This highly effective Progressive Era movement was distinct from earlier conservation efforts and later environmentalist reforms. Conservation in the Progressive Era places conservation in historical context, using the words of participants in and opponents to the movement. Together, the documents collected here reveal the various and sometimes conflicting uses of the term "conservation" and the contested nature of the reforms it described. This collection includes classic texts by such well-known figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir, as well as texts from lesser-known but equally important voices that are often overlooked in environmental studies: those of rural communities, women, and the working class. These lively selections provoke unexpected questions and ideas about many of the significant environmental issues facing us today.

Uses textual analysis, primary source documents, and an issues-centered approach to introduce American environmental history,

The debate over immigration has been a hallmark of the American nation since its earliest days, and it persists in generating a complex spectrum of opinions and emotions. United States Immigration, 1800-1965 provides a compact yet diverse selection of primary documents that helps to illuminate immigration as one of the defining features of the American social, cultural, and political landscape. A wide array of primary sources is included: documents written by immigrants that chronicle their own experiences; examples of pro- and anti-immigration sentiments and arguments; and government documents, including immigration laws and federal court rulings. In all, 75 documents (including 20 images) help to tell the story of United States immigration from roughly 1800 through to the Hart-Celler Act of 1965.

Photographs by Claude Fiddler, Essays by Steve Roper, Nancy Fiddler, Anne Macquarie, John Hart and Doug Robinson. Stunning photographs and essays that focus on the territory beyond the roads and beaten paths of Yosemite.