"The river Thames"

I recently posted an article about the impressive cleanup of the Thames, and raised the question of why that river (and other English rivers) are often identified as "the river Thames" rather than "the Thames river" (or Thames River).  It is apparently a classic American English / British English difference.  Kniffler was able to provide and excellent link on the subject, from the separated by a common language blog:

Before the late 17th century (according to the OED), the normal way to refer to rivers was the River of X... From the late 17th century, the of started to be dropped, so then we get the River X, as in the River Thames, the River Clyde, the River Cam, etc. But what else was going on in the 17th century? Oh yeah, the English coloni{s/z}ation of North America. So this is about the time when we'd expect to see transatlantic differences starting to develop...

BrE speakers generally use the American word order when referring to American rivers. One doesn't hear the River Mississippi much... and this seems to extend to the rest of the new world--BrE prefers Amazon River (7 British National Corpus hits) over the River Amazon (2 hits), but really prefers just the Amazon (over 300 hits). For European and African rivers, it's River X all the way...

I've had a quick look for rivers in the US and UK that have the same name, but haven't succeeded in finding any--but we can see what happened when the English River Avon went to Canada and Australia. According to Wikipedia, the New World versions are Avon Rivers.

Elsewhere the same blog addresses the differences between "The University of X" and "X University."

People outside the US often get American university names wrong in this way, since elsewhere University of X and X University are synonyms. Thus in the UK, University of Essex and Essex University are two names for the same thing. But in the US, University of X may very well be the name of a different university from X University. Some examples:

University of Miami is in Florida; Miami University is in Ohio...

University of Washington is in Washington State; Washington University is in Missouri.

New York University is a private university; {City/State} University of New York is city/state-funded.

University of California is in California; California University is in Pennsylvania.