ALABAMA AS THE KEYSTONE

Alabama as the Keystone: The River Systems That Organized a Continent is a groundbreaking work of environmental and cultural history that reframes North America not through borders or empires, but through land itself.

Drawing on archaeology, early cartography, hydrology, soil science, and settlement patterns, the book reveals Alabama as a central organizing node in a continental system shaped by rivers long before colonization. From Mississippian mound centers and coastal shell calendars to post-emancipation Black settlement patterns and western irrigation societies, the narrative traces a continuous land logic in which governance operated through timing, movement, maintenance, and restraint rather than conquest.

By reading rivers as infrastructure, soil as memory, and landscape as archive, this book challenges collapse narratives and reframes Indigenous and African American histories as adaptive, enduring, and environmentally literate. Alabama emerges not as a peripheral state, but as a keystone—where inland waterways, fertile ground, and coastal passage converged to organize life across a continent.

Rigorous yet accessible, Alabama as the Keystone offers a new way of understanding American history—one written not only in documents, but in the land that continues to function.