Power Lines

Phoenix’s sprawl may seem a world apart from the seeming serenity of the Navajo Nation. Andrew Needham’s Power Lines reveals how a common history of energy development came to forge ever more intense material and political connections between these two landscapes after World War II. Needham’s compelling and remarkably original book traces the little-known and often elaborate eclipse of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s hydroelectric dams by massive open-pit coal mines and power plants on and around the Navajo Reservation. Power Lines makes a signal contribution to the historiography of the twentieth-century West. No less important, it demonstrates how expertly researched and skillfully told stories of western places and subregions can transform how scholars understand questions of national and even global significance. No previous book has so masterfully exposed the sinews binding metropolitan growth, indigenous nationalism, and environmental governance in postwar America. Power Lines pivots on a quartet of major transformations: (1) the explosive mid-century growth of Phoenix and its suburbs; (2) the demise of large dam building in the Colorado River Basin after environmentalists rallied to thwart Reclamation’s plans for the Grand Canyon in the 1950s and 1960s; (3) the emergence of the Navajo Nation as the main supplier of electrical energy for the entire Southwest; and (4) the elaboration of Navajo nationalism, as young militants and their allies struggled in the 1960s and 1970s to reshape the manifestly unjust allocation of risks and rewards between the Navajo homelands of the Four Corners and the Valley of the Sun’s industrial parks and subdivisions. While previous historians had examined each of these stories in isolation, Needham integrates them into a coherent whole. He performs this alchemy by giving pride of place to the power lines of his title. In Needham’s deft analysis, the electrical wires that carried energy unlocked from Navajo coal to end users in one of the nation’s fastest-growing metroplexes serve to illuminate the less tangible—but even more consequential—lines of political-economic force generated by conflicts and collaborations by actors ranging from federal bureaucrats to Phoenix boosters, and from Navajo politicians to the Diné they ostensibly represented.

Archaeology · Canyon · Cartography · Economic history · Geography · Historiography · Metropolitan area · Nationalism · Navajo · Phoenix · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · American Environmental and Regional History · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law