Rivers run through American history in ways we rarely notice. They carried enslaved labor and cotton, drew and redrew the lines and connections between neighborhoods, absorbed the waste of industry, and now register the pressures of a warming climate. Yet, they remain among the most overlooked archives we have. This University Seminar brings together historian Scot McFarlane, whose new book The River That Made Texas traces the history of the Trinity River, and photographer Duane Bailey-Castro, whose decade-long project on the Harlem River and its bridges linking the Bronx to Manhattan reframes questions of connection and belonging, finding architectural beauty and singularity in spans that, like the communities they join, have long been undervalued and overlooked. Together their work shows how river histories shape American history: slavery and incarceration, disinvestment and gentrification, community and belonging, climate and the natural world. And it surfaces the boundary tensions that run through all public space — between water that belongs to everyone and the private claims, fences, and pollution that carve it up; between fences and bridges. You can't fence a flood. Working from a Southern river and a Northern one, from the archive and the camera, both ask what becomes visible when we attend to places treated as peripheral — and what the humanities bring to the history of rivers and public space more broadly.
