5 answers to important historical questions along the banks of a small Midwestern river.5 The following essays trace a long scope of history, from the First Americans’ arrival at the end of the Pleistocene to the rise of indigenous empires along Midwestern waterways; from the dispossession of Native Americans as a result of Puritanical ideals and Manifest Destiny to the entrenchment of the Industrial Revolution as the dominant economic force in the region; from the commodification of Fox River species to the rise of modern environmentalism; and from continuing anthropocentric issues such as industrial pollution and littering to the possibility of partial ecological restoration and personhood for the Fox River. This book is broken into four sections. Part One “Origins” is an examination of the creation and first cultures of the Fox River bioregion. Mia Benitez, in her essay “A Bioregion Transformed,” explains the Pleistocene origins of the Fox River and the geological impact of the region on successive human cultures. Zander Tamez, in his essay “Fox River: Its Long-Forgotten Inhabitants,” explores the history of the First Americans who call the Fox River home. Atharva Gawde focuses on a momentous event in North American history—the Fox Wars—in his essay “Colonial French Presence on the Fox River.” In doing so, Gawde revises traditional scholarship on the area Richard White envisions as “the middle ground.” Keira Feliciano, in her essay “The Effects of Land Cover Change on the Fox River Area,” analyzes human impacts on the Fox River watershed’s landscapes, with a particular focus on the Potawatomi people of Illinois. In “Why the Fox River?,” Maame Afua Poku asks the question: what’s in a name? Through an analysis of the origin of the name Fox, this essay connects the history of the river with conceptions of dispossession and colonial place-naming. 5 Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 1, (June 2001): 133; and Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999): 1.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Mjg3OTMy