CATASTROPHE: Hell in the Highlands

Sloping up from the narrow Atlantic coastal plain, the Eastern U.S. rears abruptly in the great earth-wrinkles of the Appalachian Highlands, stretching northeast to southwest from New England to Alabama. When early U. S. settlers pushed out from the coast into this rugged region, they built their towns, for purposes of commerce, on the narrow-valleyed rivers which flow east from the Appalachian slopes into the Atlantic, west into the Gulf of Mexico or Great Lakes. Power from these rivers helped make the northern Highlands the great manufacturing region of the U. S.,...

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