128 pages The John Day Company  (New York) Publication Date: January 1964 Hardcover ISBN: N.A.

Water traffic today is as modern as the space age, far removed from Huckleberry Finn and his raft or the Mississippi sternwheeler. Every one of America's twenty-two largest cities is on an ocean, a lake, or a navigable river, and almost 10 percent of the nation's freight moves by inland waterway. Our nearly 30,000 miles of navigable water routes are plied by vessels that are powerful marvels of technology. One towboat, the new MV America, pushes a tow of more than forty barges, which comprises an area of over seven and one-half acres and a length of more than a third of a mile. The tow holds a cargo equivalent to one thousand railroad cars or four ocean freighters. Thanks to radar, the boat and barges work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week--all this along the Mississippi River that in some places is no deeper than nine feet.

This book tells the complete and up-to-date story of our busy inland waterways, with chapters on their history, routes, vessels, crews, and cargoes, and an especially vivid account of an actual towboat voyage down the Mississippi from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans.

Ben J. Wattenberg is a senior fellow at AEI.