Exploring Submerged Resilience: The Atlas of Drowned Towns.

The article focuses on the Atlas of Drowned Towns, a digital public history project that documents and interprets the histories of communities displaced and submerged by large dam reservoirs, with an initial focus on thirteen dams in Oregon's Willamette Valley. It explores the concept of resilience among displaced populations, emphasizing three themes: resistance to displacement, insistence on the value of inundated communities and their perspectives, and persistence through memory and storytelling. Through community engagement events called "History Jamborees" and an interactive website, the project facilitates the collection and sharing of artifacts, oral histories, and personal narratives, enabling displaced people and their descendants to participate in preserving and re-creating their lost places. The Atlas challenges dominant narratives of inevitable erasure by highlighting the diverse responses of inundated communities and expanding scholarly understanding of resilience beyond mere resistance.