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After the Civil War, the New York City's East River was a massive unsolved and dangerous navigation problem. A major waterway into and out of the Harbor--where customs revenue equaled 42 percent of the U.S. Government's income--the river's many hindrances, centered around Hell Gate, included whirlpools, rocks and reefs. These, combined with swirling currents and powerful tides, led to deaths, cargo losses and destruction of vessels. Charged with clearing the river, General John Newton of the Army Corps of Engineers went to work with the most rudimentary tools for diving, mining, lighting, pumping and drilling. His crews worked for 20 years, using a steam-drilling scow of his own design and a new and perilous explosive--nitroglycerine. In 1885, Newton destroyed the nine-acre Flood Rock with 282,730 pounds of high explosives. The demolition was watched by tens of thousands. This book chronicles the clearing of the East River and the ingenuity of the Army engineer whose work was praised by the National Academy of Sciences.

This volume looks at the concept of the ‘local’ in Indian history. Through a case study of Bengal, it studies how worldwide currents—be it colonial governance, pedagogic practices or intellectual rhythms—simultaneously inform and interact with particular local idioms to produce variegated histories of a region. It examines the processes through which the idea of the ‘local’ gets constituted in different spatial entities such as the frontier province of the Jangal Mahal, the Sundarbans, the dry terrain of Birbhum-Bankura-Purulia and the urban spaces of Calcutta and other small towns. The volume further discusses the various administrative as well as amateur representations of these settings to chart out the ways through which certain spaces get associated with a particular image or history. The chapters in the volume explore a variety of themes—textual representations of the region, epistemic practices and educational policies, as well as administrative manoeuvres and governmental practices which helped the state in mapping its people. An important contribution in the study of Indian history, this interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of science and technology studies, history, sociology and social anthropology and South Asian studies.