Rising Tide: the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America

John M. Barry reconstructs the spring 1927 flood that covered some 27,000 square miles of the lower Mississippi Valley. He follows the engineers who insisted on levees alone, the New Orleans bankers who dynamited a levee to spare the city and displaced St. Bernard Parish, and the Black sharecroppers forced to work on levees at gunpoint. Herbert Hoover's relief work made his political name, and the flood pushed Black Southerners north.

For readers of American history, politics and disaster narratives. It shows how a natural catastrophe revealed failures of engineering, race and class, and helped redraw the role of the federal government.

Outward-looking; a moderate read.

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