Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

When Mother Nature rages, the physical results are never subtle. Because we cannot contain the weather, we can only react by tabulating the damage in dollar amounts, estimating the number of people left homeless, and laying the plans for rebuilding. But as John M. Barry expertly details in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, some calamities transform much more than the landscape.

While tracing the history of the nation's most destructive natural disaster, Barry explains how ineptitude and greed helped cause the flood, and how the policies created to deal with the disaster changed the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Existing racial rifts expanded, helping to launch Herbert Hoover into the White House and shifting the political alliances of many blacks in the process. An absorbing account of a little-known, yet monumental event in American history, Rising Tide reveals how human behavior proved more destructive than the swollen river itself.

• The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
• The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
• Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (Library of Southern Civilization)
• Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta
• The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity
• The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea
• The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
• Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
• Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty
• Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times