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Buy the "Great Projects" videos and companion book at ShopPBS. |
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A Federal Responsibility? George Norris, a Republican senator from Nebraska, believed electricity to be of such elemental importance that it should be produced and sold by the federal government. Throughout the 1920s, he championed proposals for the federal government to take over Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals and generate current for distribution throughout the Tennessee Valley. He found an ally in President Franklin Roosevelt who saw the Tennessee Valley as a social laboratory where the elixir of cheap electrical current might bring prosperity and health to a poor people. |
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  How engineers contained and controlled the Colorado and Mississippi rivers. Thomas Edison lights up New York City; Sam Insull brings power to Chicago; and TVA electrifies rural America Constructing the George Washington Bridge Putting a major highway under Boston  |
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