The story of human civilization has to a great degree been the story of the world’s great rivers (think Nile, Euphrates, Thames): nurturers of agriculture, commerce, and cultural exchange. On our own continent, no waterway, not even the Mississippi, has formed and reflected our culture and economy so profoundly as the Hudson River. It is the river of firsts, as Tom Lewis writes in his highly entertaining and informative new history of the Hudson (Yale University Press, 352 pages, $30):

The first great river that explorers came upon when they arrived in the New World; the first river that led explorers into the continent’s uncharted interior; the river that was the first line of defense in the American Revolution; the river of America’s first writers, the river that inspired America’s first great painters; the river millions of immigrants first encountered when they stepped off their boats onto the new land; the river whose deepwater port helped New York City become the nation’s foremost financial center; the river that inspired America’s first conservationists.

By the time Mr. Lewis finishes his tale, the reader shares his enthusiasm and is persuaded that the Hudson, as he insists, is “the center of the nation’s cultural geography.”

The most interesting part of the narrative deals with the early European settlement of the valley. It is nearly impossible to connect the wild vistas and exotic names of that era with the prosaic urban sprawl of the region today. At the time of the first Dutch and English settlements, the Hudson Valley (that is, the land on either side of the lower Hudson, the navigable stretch between Troy and New York City) was contested by various independent bands of Native Americans including the Raritan, the Hackensack, the Tappan, the Canarsee, and the Mahicans. The redoubtable nations of the Iroquois had preceded the Dutch to the west bank of the river by only a few decades, and, by 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed up the river in the Half Moon, the area was already, as Mr. Lewis writes, “a war zone.”

Policy set in Amsterdam and London was surprisingly desultory and irresolute; neither government seemed to have any very firm idea of just what sort of settlement it wanted. The mercantile Dutch saw their holdings along the Hudson as little more than fur-trading depots, although they did pioneer the practice of granting large manorial estates to “patroons” who agreed to plant colonies of at least 50 “souls.” The only one of these Dutch colonies to survive into the next century was Rensselaerwyck, an immense demesne near modern Albany. Another sizable colony belonged to Adriaen van der Donck, known as the Young Squire or “Jonkheer” – a name that survives in “Yonkers.”

In 1649 the prescient van der Donck wrote to the states general in Holland that “The country has arrived to that state, that if it be not assisted it will not need any aid hereafter because the English will wholly absorb it.” This is exactly what happened 15 years later, when the English crown helped itself to New Netherland. New Amsterdam became New York, Fort Orange became Albany, and the river that had been alternately called the Mauritius and the Nordt became the Hudson, named after its first English explorer. The British government continued the tradition of issuing patents for large manors; the greatest estate thus created was that of Livingston Manor, which eventually reached a total of 1 million acres. The Livingston family held economic and social sway in the valley for many generations.

Control of the river, which leads to the St. Lawrence and Canada via lakes George and Champlain, was crucial in the French and Indian War and during the American Revolution. A large proportion of the fighting in both these conflicts took place along its banks, including the key Revolutionary battles of Saratoga, Harlem Heights, and West Point, where Benedict Arnold was so dramatically unmasked.

The 19th century saw the Hudson achieve new importance as a center of both industry and communications. The partnership between Robert R. Livingston and Robert Fulton launched the first steamboat in 1807 and was responsible for eventually turning the Hudson into a busy thoroughfare. In the 1820s the opening of the Erie Canal united the eastern and western sides of the Appalachian range and changed the Hudson Valley from an agrarian to an industrial economy. The advent of the railroad continued the transformation of the valley’s sleepy villages and farms into burgeoning suburbs. Walt Whitman celebrated the romance of the rails:

Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.

Whitman would, one feels, have been a big booster for the Internet.

The 1820s also saw the unprecedented celebration of the region’s untamed natural wonders by the painters of the Hudson River School. Thomas Cole first visited the area in 1825 and found in the Catskill Mountains the quintessence of the romantic sublime he had long sought. Asher Durand, John Frederick Kensett, and Frederic Church followed his lead and developed his themes.

In many ways Washington Irving’s [and] Thomas Cole’s … Hudson Valley was a fantasy that was belied by the work of men like Zadock Pratt [the tannery king, despoiler of upstate New York’s hemlock forests] and Elam Lynds [the builder of Sing Sing prison]. Every artist and writer who gazed on the valley wearing blinkers was matched by an entrepreneur who looked on the same scene with the thought of capitalizing on its economic possibilities.

This dichotomy continues today with, in just one example, the ongoing battle between the St. Lawrence cement company and various environmental and preservationist groups.

Mr. Lewis’s narrative is full of charming nuggets – who could ever guess, for instance, that “Poughkeepsie” is an Indian word for “reed-covered lodge by the little-water place”? – and scenes, such as Franklin Roosevelt serving hot dogs to King George VI at his estate near the wonderfully named Crum Elbow, or Henry James’s impressions of the changes that had overtaken the Hudson after his absence of more than 20 years. And at under 300 pages, the book is packed with information and free of pedantry, a perfect introduction to the region between New York Harbor and the Adirondacks.

Ms. Allen’s “Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior” and “Twentieth-Century Attitudes: Literary Powers in Uncertain Times” are both available from Ivan R. Dee.