Sacramento Delta

Fantastic Geo-Historical Visualization of California’s Inland Delta

Article-Grid, Cartography, GeoNotes, Historical Geography, Northern California / By Martin W. Lewis

A new interactive website on the changing conditions in California’s inland delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers provides one of the best visualizations in historical geography that I have every seen. Produced as a collaborative project of called QUEST, KQED’s science and environment program, the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s Aquatic Science Center, and Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West, the project includes detailed maps, evocative historical photographs, and compelling text. The Delta is one of the state’s most thoroughly transformed environments, and is the site of major water and land-use controversies. This project provides much-needed geo-historical context for an important but often overlooked region.

About GeoCurrents

GeoCurrents is dedicated to exploring the geographical and historical patterns that underlie the world’s current events and that structure global and regional relationships. Maps are used in all posts not merely to show where events occur, but also to illustrate the processes involved.

GeoCurrents tries to avoid taking sides on contentious issues, seeking rather to foster an enriching exchange of information and ideas. As its scope is both fully global and deeply historical, the author is usually operating outside of his own fields of expertise. As a result, mistakes and simplifications can be expected. Corrections and elaborations are more than welcome in the comments section. Comments with insulting or abusive language, however, will be deleted.

Readers interested in opinion-based essays by Martin W. Lewis will be able to find them on his personal webpage.

About The Author

Martin W. Lewis is senior lecturer emeritus at Stanford University, where he taught world history and world geography from 2002 to 2022. He earned a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, and previously taught at George Washington University and Duke University. A list of his published works will soon be made available on his personal website.

GeoCurrents’ Conceptual Concerns

GeoCurrents is concerned about almost anything that has a geographical expression and hence can be explored and elucidated through maps. Topics of interest range from the deadly serious to the quirky and whimsical.

Many GeoCurrents posts take on issues of political geography, ranging from wars and ethnic conflicts to electoral returns. Behind these writings is a conviction that the basic world political map is unduly simplistic, making the world seem much more orderly than it really is. A book-length elaboration of this thesis – entitled Seduced by the Map – will be available on the author’s personal webpage by the end of 2023, if not earlier. The introduction and initial chapters on this book can be found on this website. A summary of the main arguments in Seduced by the Map can be found here.

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