Read a free excerpt here! American engineers have done astounding things to bend the Mississippi River to their will: forcing one of its tributaries to flow uph

In his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain personified the river as “Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthqua

At two o’clock in the morning on 27 April 1865, seven miles north of Memphis on the Mississippi, the sidewheel steamboat Sultana’s boilers suddenly exploded

In the early days of 1937, the Ohio River, swollen by heavy winter rains, began rising. And rising. And rising. By the time the waters crested, the Ohio and Mis

The people that will be most affected by a “greater Cedar Rapids” were staying home, or were still coping in FEMA trailers where the water pipes routinely b