This is Civics 101. I'm Nick Capadiche and today we are bringing you something a little different.

It is an episode produced by our fellow NHPR podcast Outside In.

It touches Civics insofar as a public organization does make a

cameo the Army Corps of Engineers but it touches us in another way. It's about

the iconic Mississippi River which Americans and the government have tried to tame for more than 200 years.

And it's about how this river, one that has been such an important line of demarcation for our country, continues to fight back.

The town of Greenville, Mississippi had been wet for months.

It had been storming in America since the fall before and the river had been rising and rising and rising. This is author and journalist Bois Uphold. The year was 1927.

If you walk on top of the levee you could feel the soils shaking because they were so waterlogged.

For months and months water had been pressing against this levee and like pouring through these soils.

That rising river?

It's the Mississippi. And on this day in April, it looked like a scene out of a war movie.

At that levy, it was just raucous with activity. People were up there stacking sandbags, piling them up trying to make

sure that the river as it kept rising and rising and rising wasn't going to pour over and inundate this town.

Just north of Greenville, a worker saw what everyone had been worried about,

a crack in the soil.

We have reports from this, you know, someone saw it coming and said, well, she can't hold

it much longer. And then all of a sudden the

water pours through, rips through the sandbags, and then rips through the levy.

And in a pretty short period of time this giant pile of earth just becomes this massive torrent bigger than Niagara Falls. People in the town of Greenville watched entire homes float by, dead livestock, human bodies.

The thing that strikes me the most, the metaphor is people made about the sound.

People said it was like a train, it was like a snarling beast,

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