An Altogether Different Problem

In contrast to the Colorado River, the main challenge posed by the Mississippi River was how to keep the water off the land. Through the millennia, the Mississippi and its tributaries—a fifteen-thousand-mile web of waterways draining more than a third of the continental United States—rise with the rains every spring and often spill out on the land. By the 1920s, the levees of the lower Mississippi—built over centuries to keep the water off the land-stood unbroken from the mouth of the Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico, a thousand miles on either side, three to four stories high.

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A Tale of Two Rivers

How engineers contained and controlled the Colorado and Mississippi rivers.

Electric Nation

Thomas Edison lights up New York City; Sam Insull brings power to Chicago; and TVA electrifies rural America

Bridging New York

Constructing the George Washington Bridge

The Big Dig

Putting a major highway under Boston