Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
31
result(s) for
"Disaster relief United States History 20th century."
Sort by:
The Disaster Experts
In the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, many are asking what, if anything, can be done to prevent large-scale disasters. How is it that we know more about the hazards of modern American life than ever before, yet the nation faces ever-increasing losses from such events? History shows that disasters are not simply random acts. Where is the logic in creating an elaborate set of fire codes for buildings, and then allowing structures like the Twin Towers-tall, impressive, and risky-to go up as design experiments? Why prepare for terrorist attacks above all else when floods, fires, and earthquakes pose far more consistent threats to American life and prosperity?The Disaster Expertstakes on these questions, offering historical context for understanding who the experts are that influence these decisions, how they became powerful, and why they are only slightly closer today than a decade ago to protecting the public from disasters. Tracing the intertwined development of disaster expertise, public policy, and urbanization over the past century, historian Scott Gabriel Knowles tells the fascinating story of how this diverse collection of professionals-insurance inspectors, engineers, scientists, journalists, public officials, civil defense planners, and emergency managers-emerged as the authorities on risk and disaster and, in the process, shaped modern America.
eBook
Disaster Citizenship
A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era–beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States-Canada borderlands--the Salem Fire of 1914 and the Halifax Explosion of 1917--saw working class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. Both official and unofficial responses, meanwhile, showed how the United States and Canada were linked by experts, workers, and money. In Disaster Citizenship , Jacob A. C. Remes draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions--both formal and informal--that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. He explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as he shows, these methods--though often quick and effective--remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive \"solutions\" on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape. Innovative and engaging, Disaster Citizenship excavates the forgotten networks of solidarity and obligation in an earlier time while simultaneously suggesting new frameworks in the emerging field of critical disaster studies.
eBook
Camille, 1969
Thirty-six years before Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and southern Mississippi, the region was visited by one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the United States: Camille. Mark M. Smith offers three highly original histories of the storm's impact in southern Mississippi. In the first essay Smith examines the sensory experience and impact of the hurricane-how the storm rearranged and challenged residents' senses of smell, sight, sound, touch, and taste. The second essay explains the way key federal officials linked the question of hurricane relief and the desegregation of Mississippi's public schools. Smith concludes by considering the political economy of short- and long-term disaster recovery, returning to issues of race and class. Camille, 1969 offers stories of survival and experience, of the tenacity of social justice in the face of a natural disaster, and of how recovery from Camille worked for some but did not work for others. Throughout these essays are lessons about how we might learn from the past in planning for recovery from natural disasters in the future.
eBook
The political history of American food aid : an uneasy benevolence
This book discusses the 220-year history of the political and humanitarian uses of American food as a tool of both foreign and domestic policy. During these years, food aid has been used as a weapon against the expansion of bolshevism after World War I and communism after World War II, a cudgel to force policy changes by recalcitrant recipient governments, a method for balancing disputes between Israel and Egypt, a backdoor means of increasing military aid to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, a signal of support to friendly governments, and a resource to help achieve economic development in food-insecure countries. At home, international food aid has, at times, been used to dump troublesome food surpluses abroad and has served politicians as a tool to secure the votes of farming constituents and the political support of agriculture-sector lobbyists, commodity traders, transporters, and shippers. Most important in the minds of many, it has been the most visible—and most popular—means of providing humanitarian aid to tens of millions of hungry men, women, and children confronted, on distant shores, by war, terrorism, and natural cataclysms and the resulting threat—if not the reality—of famine and death. The book investigates the little-known, not well-understood, and often highly contentious political processes that have converted fields of grains, crops of pulses, and herds of livestock into the tools of U.S. government policy.
eBook
The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal
Louis, Chicago, and Tulsa between 1917 and 1921; help for African American and white Southerners after the Mississippi flood of 1927; relief projects during the Dust Bowl and after the New DealAn epilogue relates the history of the American Red Cross since the beginning of World War II and illuminates the organization's current practices as well as its international reputation.
eBook
Florida and the Mariel Boatlift of 1980
Winner of the Florida Historical Society's 2015 Stetson
Kennedy Award The 1980 Mariel Boatlift was a
profound episode in twentieth-century American history, impacting
not just Florida, but the entire country. During the first twenty
days of the boatlift, with little support from the federal
government, the state of Florida coordinated and responded to the
sudden arrival in Key West of more than thirty thousand Cuban
refugees, the first wave of immigrants who became known as
“Marielitos.” Kathleen Dupes Hawk, Ron Villella,
Adolfo Leyva de Varona, and Kristen Cifers combine the insights
of expert observers with the experiences of actual participants.
The authors organize and present a wealth of primary sources,
first-hand accounts, archival research, government records, and
interviews with policy-makers, volunteers, and refugees that
bring into focus the many far-reaching human, political, and
cultural outcomes of the Mariel Boatlift that continue to
influence Florida, the United States, and Cuba today. Emerging
from these key records and accounts is a grand narrative of high
human drama. Castro’s haphazard and temporary opening of
Cuba spurred many thousands of Cubans to depart in calamitously
rushed, unprepared, and dangerous conditions. The book tells the
stories of these Cuban citizens, most legitimately seeking
political asylum but also including subversive agents, convicted
criminals, and the mentally ill, who began arriving in the US
beginning in April 1980. It also recounts how local and state
agencies and private volunteers with few directives or resources
were left to improvise ways to provide the Marielitos food,
shelter, and security as well as transportation away from Key
West. The book provides a definitive account of the political,
legal, and administrative twists on the local, state, and federal
levels in response to the crisis as well as of the
often-dysfunctional attempts at collaboration between
governmental and private institutions. Vivid and readable,
Florida and the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 presents the
significant details that illuminate and humanize this complex
humanitarian, political, and logistical crisis.
eBook
Saving San Francisco
Combining the experiences of ordinary people with urban politics and history,Saving San Franciscochallenges the long-lived myth that the 1906 disaster erased social differences as it leveled the city. Highlighting new evidence from San Francisco's relief camps, Andrea Rees Davies shows that as policy makers directed various forms of aid to groups and projects that enjoyed high social status before the disaster, the widespread need and dislocation created opportunities for some groups to challenge biased relief policy. Poor and working-class refugees organized successful protests, while Chinatown business leaders and middle-class white women mobilized resources for the less privileged. Ultimately, however, the political and financial elite shaped relief and reconstruction efforts and cemented social differences in San Francisco.
eBook