eBook

Inventing Disaster

CYNTHIA A. KIERNER

2019

Overview

When hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other disasters strike, we count our losses, search for causes, commiserate with victims, and initiate relief efforts. Amply illustrated and expansively researched,Inventing Disaster explains the origins and development of this predictable, even ritualized, culture of calamity over three centuries, exploring its roots in the revolutions in science, information, and emotion that were part of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and America. Beginning with the collapse of the early seventeenth-century Jamestown colony, ending with the deadly Johnstown flood of 1889, and highlighting fires, epidemics, earthquakes, and exploding steamboats along the way, Cynthia A. Kierner tells horrific stories of culturally significant calamities and their victims and charts efforts to explain, prevent, and relieve disaster-related losses. Although how we interpret and respond to disasters has changed in some ways since the nineteenth century, Kierner demonstrates that, for better or worse, the intellectual, economic, and political environments of earlier eras forged our own twenty-first-century approach to disaster, shaping the stories we tell, the precautions we ponder, and the remedies we prescribe for disaster-ravaged communities.

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press,University of North Carolina Press
• Subject: 17th century / 18th century / 19th century / American Studies / Colonial Period (1600-1775) / Disasters / Disasters-North Atlantic Region-History-17th century / Disasters-North Atlantic Region-History-18th century / Disasters-North Atlantic Region-History-19th century / Disasters-Political aspects-History / Disasters-Social aspects-History / HISTORY / North Atlantic Region / Political aspects / Social aspects / Sociology / United States
• ISBN: 146965251X, 9781469652511