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Rivers, Memory and Nation-Building: A History of the Volga and Mississippi Rivers. By Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. Pp. xiii+189. $95.
In this well-written, thoughtful, and engaging study, Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted writes about the symbolic, cultural, political, and other meanings of two rivers, the Mississippi in the United States and the Volga in Russia (the USSR). Drawing on a variety of primary and secondary sources, she discusses how these rivers have served a variety of purposes; have been the source of local pride and of myth-making, folk tales, imagery, and rich collective memories; and how they have played crucial economic and political roles in nation-building. Zeisler-Vralsted's book is an important contribution to a growing body of historical and journalistic work on rivers and their historical and transnational significance. This work's novelty is its comparative approach in its examination of diverse narratives and in its use of the sources of collective memory-prose, poetry, art, and song, as well as engineering studies, and public pamphlets and documents.
Through her analysis, Zeisler-Vralsted sheds light on race and class,...