4 stream beloved by Schiavone and the Friends of the Fox River in the twenty-first, because the application of human culture allowed these different people and disparate groups to create distinct and dynamic places in the same geographic space. Untangling these unique perspectives is a core goal of this book. Another objective is to use the Fox River—despite its humble size and relative obscurity—as a lens for understanding broader United States history. The Fox is just one of more than 250,000 rivers in the United States. The roughly 200-miles of river that flows through Wisconsin and Illinois is less than 0.0067% of the more than 3-million miles of rivers that course throughout the country. Scholars have written hundreds of books about major rivers throughout the United States, with particular focus on the Mississippi, Missouri, Colorado, and Columbia. While historian Gregory Summers published Consuming Nature: Environmentalism in the Fox River Valley, 1850-1950, concerning a separate yet identically named waterway in northern Wisconsin, the following is the first academic history of this particular river.4 This collective chronicle of the Fox River borrows from the still emerging field microhistory and highlights some key ideologies, moments, and eras in American history. Historian Jill Lepore, focusing on the difference between biography and microhistory, contends that “microhistory is founded upon…[this] assumption: however singular a person's life may be, the value of examining it lies not in its uniqueness, but in its exemplariness, in how that individual's life serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole.” Our book is essentially a microhistory focused on the Fox River. To paraphrase Charles Joyner’s conception of microhistory, this book seeks 4 Martin Doyle, The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018): 10-11; and Gregory Summers, Consuming Nature: Environmentalism in the Fox River Valley, 1850-1950, (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2006).
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