Battling the Inland Sea: Floods, Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley

In its natural condition the Sacramento Valley was a flood—ravaged region where an inland sea a hundred miles long regularly formed during the rainy season, to drain slowly away by the summer months. Today the Valley is marvelously productive, with a great capital city at its center, but only after a seventy—year struggle to devise and build an intricate thousand miles of levees and drains. Robert Kelley sets that battle within the encompassing national political culture, which produced, th...