Winona Daily News

https://openriver.winona.edu/winonadailynews/2042/thumbnail.jp

Holding Back the Waters: Land Development and the Origins of Levees on the Mississippi, 1720-1845.

Man\u27s efforts to control flooding on the Mississippi began about 280 years ago, but the first 130 years has been neglected in scholarly literature. In spite of abundant primary sources, most histories of flood control on the Mississippi revolve around hydraulic engineering and the contributions of state and federal levee bureaucracies---factors which had almost no impact on the creation of the levee system. Engineers did install the first levee at New Orleans and levees on their own plantations in the 1720s, but the extension of the levee line thereafter was almost entirely the work of private land developers supervised at the local level, first by commandants, then by parish and county governments. The soil of the floodplain accumulated over centuries as sediment deposited by overflows. Its fertility laid the basis for plantation agriculture, with the Mississippi as a means of transport, but overflows destroyed farmers\u27 improvements. Native American hunting farmers who moved in concert with overflows were able to coexist with flooding, but did not conceive of land as property. When European kings began to convert swampland into property by means of grants, the prevention of flooding through levees was made a condition of title. Persons who wanted swampland as property built levees to acquire it. People who did not value land, or lacked the means to levee it, moved on and did not become part of the levee-building community. Since levees must be continuous to be effective, developers of the riverside had to submit to regimentation, coercion, and continuous oversight. Liberty was tempered by the demands of the environment. The records of the era 1720 to 1845 tell a story of levee history quite different from that of the engineers\u27 and post-bellum levee bureaucracies. Sources which reveal the levees\u27 origins are various: letters of commandants, parish police jury and county board of police minutes, state levee laws for local bodies, newspaper accounts of floods, travel journals, tax and census records, and private papers. They tell of a vibrant community of land developers who domesticated the swamps with levees in the interest of survival and prosperity

The Siren of Cirebon: a tenth-century trading vessel lost in the Java Sea

This thesis examines data collected during the salvage of the cargo of a merchant ves-sel foundered in the Java Sea, by a short inscription in a fragment of a bowl and coins dat-ed to around 970 CE. The wreck’s position indicates that the ship was on her way to the island of Java; the verssel herself belongs into the so called ‘lashed-lug and doweled’, Western Austronesian (‘Malayo-Indonesian’) tradition of boat-building. The surviving cargo ranges from Chinese stonewares and Southeast Asian ceramics to Middle Eastern glassware, tin and lead from –proposedly– the Malay Archipelago, and a wide variety of “smaller finds”, most of which can be attributed to the broader area of the western Indian Ocean. The find palpably demonstrates the far-reaching and well-institutionalised trade rela-tions throughout early medieval Asia. It is often assumed that pre-modern Asian com-merce was largely organised in small-scale ventures, the so called “pedlar trade”, and a number of sources indicate structural features of the ships facilitating this commerce that could have supported such a “particularised” exchange. However, a critical assessment of the composition and distribution of the ship’s payload and a virtual reconstruction of the ship and her initial loading pattern reveal that the vessel’s ceramic cargo in all probability was not acquired, handled, and bound to be marketed as a particularised “peddling” ven-ture, but managed by a single authority. The huge amount of ceramics carried on the ves-sel raises questions regarding frequency, volume and modus operandi of maritime ex-changes in tenth-century Southeast Asia, implying that the ship’s tragic voyage was but an attempt at instituting a virtual monopoly in such trade