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View of the Mississippi River and the city of Grand Rapids from the Fire Tower at the Forest History Center. Photo courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society, Tumblr.
Geographies

Past Flowing to Present and Future Along the Upper Mississippi

A turn-of-the-last-century logging camp; a modest house on the Mississippi that sparked the dreams of a young boy; an early-statehood-era farm; a flour mill; a fort and its surroundings that have layers of contested meaning; a collection of houses from the pre-statehood era; a railroad magnate’s palatial house. What—if anything—do these things have in common?

Aerial shot of a river flowing through an extremely dry environment.
Forum

Meandering and Riversphere: The Potential of Paradox

Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 BCE-475 BCE) was the master of paradox: “It rests by changing,” “a thing agrees at variance with itself,” and “the same: living and dead, and the waking and the sleeping, and the young and the old” (Kahn 1979, Fragments LII, LXXVIII, XCIII). Both Plato and Aristotle saw his views as logically incoherent and inconsistent with the law of non-contradiction.

People gather for a religious ceremony near the water.
Forum

The Sources of the Nile and Paradoxes of Religious Waters

The River Nile has long been a subject of study and veneration. From the earliest times the Nile has presented problems upon which men have speculated. “Two of the most important which have been discussed since the time of Herodotus, the position of the sources of the Nile and the origin of its annual flood, were solved during the last and at the beginning of the present century.”[1]

Fishing on the Nile. Photographer Islam Hassan.
Primary Sources

Paradoxes of Water: A Reading List

Questions about water are often implicitly about systems of power. The benefits and impacts of how water is used, distributed, and accessed are unevenly distributed. Water thus becomes a site where the inequalities in society are made visible and contestation arises. The readings listed here offer a sample of some of the ways water is implicated in systems of inequality and work toward social justice.