Survey of history of "America's sea." Very thorough description of its environmental depredation, primarily from outflow of industrial wastes and the collateral damage from petrochemical industry. Interesting that more damage to the gulf occurs from watershed runoff, with all its agribusiness-related chemicals, canals, jetties (which increase river flow, pushing silt ever further into the ocean, robbing estuaries of earth, food and fresh water), and overdevelopment.

Stunning accomplishment. Plenty of footnotes and references.

What a wonderful history of the Gulf is told in this book. The abundance found in this book is remarkable. That many failed to see or realize the potential in this body of water is interesting. It also tells the story of how those from far away played apart in the marketing of the Gulf. ( )

Gulf: The Making of An American Sea
Author: Jack Emerson Davis
Publisher: Live Right Publishing Corporation
Publishing Date: 2017
Pgs: 592
Dewey: 909.096364 DAV
Disposition: Irving Public Library - South Campus - Irving, TX
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REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Summary:
First peoples, Spaniards, French, British, and Americans...Fish, crustaceans, tourism, manufacturing, and oil, welcome to the Gulf of Mexico.

From its formation to the 21st century, an all-encompassing attempt to give a complete look at what the Gulf was, what it is, and what it will be in the future. Artists and fishermen, Sailors, soldiers, colonizers, and conquistadors. Slaves and slave traders. Pirates and oilmen. Oil spills and hurricanes...and fertilizer fueled anoxic dead zones...and real estate.

It is a beautiful place full of life, provided we don’t ultimately kill it with pollution and disregard for what it truly is.
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Genre:
Science
Ecology
Coastal Ecology
Coastal Ecosystems
Natural History
US History
Oceanography

Why this book:
I’ve been to the Gulf more than to any other saltwater anywhere in the world.
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Cover Art:
Well done. It captures its subject.

Favorite Character:
The Gulf, itself, is the main character here.

The more I read about him the more I like Walter Anderson. Artist. Philosopher. He was a couple of hours in a rowboat away from civilization while Thoreau was close enough to Emerson’s cottage that someone was doing his laundry for him.

Plot Holes/Out of Character:
Only the plot hole is in our history books. The Karrankawa being cannibals was all myth and allegory. But this was still taught in Texas history books as recently as the 1980s.

The First Peoples were farming and ranching before Spaniards and Anglos arrived. I’m staring at you hard, Texas History textbook.

So...dinosaurs didn’t make oil and the brontosaurus was in fact a different -osaurus with somebody else’s head attached? Geez. History books lying to us.

Favorite Quote:
Walter Anderson: On the wave comes in, magic. What glowing sequences of color, what strange convolutions of form.

Favorite Concept:
Official British policy stating that North America was empty had a gigantic influence on the way Americans looked at the history of the continent, the first peoples, and Anglo, French, and Spanish complicity in genocide.

The storms and the birth of the National Weather Service.

Hmm Moments:
Imagine if the Spanish and French crowns had been united around the time of the founding of New Orleans and what that would have meant, not only for America, North and South, but also for Europe's future?

Padre Island history has its own cast of interesting characters: The Singer Sewing Machine Company, cattle ranches, shipwrecks, Audie Murphy, Union sympathizers ran off by the Confederates, The Devil's Elbow, and $80,000 in Old Spanish Gold buried somewhere in the dunes.

The stories of the wrecks and the salvage yards on Key West preying on ships was pretty interesting. Could’ve been a history all to itself.

WTF Moments:
Thomas Jefferson and American assistance to the Haitian Slave Revolt against Napoleonic rule are vastly understated in history. But instead of being a cause celeb movement for freedom, it was cynicism in the form of thwarting Napoleon's ambitions.

Andrew Jackson's actions as regards the escaped slave fort on the Apalachicola River in Spanish Territory are classic Ugly American. The baiting and using the fort’s response as justification for its destruction are horrible.

Can't believe that Jefferson supported Jackson's military adventurism, outside of orders, in Florida, and Jackson's desire to move against and conquer Cuba. Monroe and those in Washington, ill at Jackson's antics, held the line. Although, they did snatch up Florida when they got the chance. And they did that in the face of, Southerners with designs not only on Cuba, but Venezuela, and Brazil beyond that.

Meh / PFFT Moments:
After commenting on how First People’s history is treated in both history books and by the peoples of today’s Gulf, the author gives them comparative short shrift. The book was already long and wordy. Giving First People’s history more than a cursory glance would’ve been appreciated. Instead, they are largely a strawman construct that the coming invaders wash over.

The Sigh:
European colonization and exploration meant ignoring, discounting, destroying, and forgetting the First People's cultures of the Gulf region in both the U.S. and Mexico.

Panfilo de Narváez was both arrogant and stupid, failing to learn the lessons of those who came before him. The idea of letting his ships get out of sight so that he could march northward from Tampa Bay to Apalachicola is just damn foolish.

Ecological professional arrogance impacting the study of deep-sea life, I'm shocked looks side-eyed at every scientist who appears on Fox News.

St. Petersburg’s history of sewage dumping is a repeating story, ad nauseam, from the Keys all the way around to Brownsville.

Juxtaposition:
Winslow Homer's truth about the Gulf may have been accurate in the early 1900s. Today it's bedraggled, overrun with electric lines and tourist traps, and its industrial and oil industry scars. Shabby, but I love the Gulf. ...but the brown water is the brown water.

And overfishing comes along with Americans seemingly intent on killing the Golden Goose. Fishing and birding to extinction. Though, is it. Or is the population die off as a function of America and her industries using the Gulf like a toilet that will flush away all the ills that we pour into it.

Mosquitoes and disease both as big a shaper of golf culture as fishing in oil.

Oilmen and wildcatters as fine upstanding American heroes is laughable. That's a feet-of-clay bunch of guys being elevated by history just because if ever there was one. From Texas history, you'd think that every one of them found oil, instead of the success rate being one in 100,000 or higher.

Land Barons destroying the real Florida; filling in the bays, cutting down the mangrove. Come on down, move to paradise, as we destroy paradise.

Turn the fishers against each other, and go right on polluting. It’s classic and we're too stupid to stop it as it happens over and over, all across the American experience.

The Unexpected:
I never considered that the Gulf is on a par with the Old West as helping define America beyond the colonial era.
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Last Page Sound:
From an American Sea, teeming with fish to a shithole drowning in oil, waste, and pollution. Welcome to the Gulf. Come swim in the effluvium.

Questions I’m Left With:
If the Spanish were truly planning colonies, where were the fishermen? Where were the tradesmen? This was all about silver and gold.

Conclusions I’ve Drawn:
I submit that the unreconstructed Southerner is the forebearer of many of the problems we have today in America.

Author Assessment:
I would read other Eco-Histories by this author.
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nonfiction - history/political-geography/industry and development vs. the environment. ( )

5724. The Gulf The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis (read 12 Dec 2020) (Pulitzer History prize for 2018) This is the 57th winner of the Pulitzer History prize which I have read. Which seems lot quite a few, but 93 books have won that prize, so I will not get all of them read. This one I did not find unfailingly interesting, For one thing, it jumped around a lot and I prefer my history to begin at the beginning and go to the end. This book did begin at the beginning but wandered around, back and forth. It spent lots of pages showing the mistakes made with the environment, up to the present. Since the 2011 explosion was a major event I thought it would be given a full account, but it was not really set out as to what happened though it was glancingly referred to. Some of the history related was of interest but I often read not very interesting stuff not very pertinent, I thought, to the history of the Gulf of Mexico. It does seem clear that money or profit was often allowed to be more significant than the effect on the environment. ( )