Inventing disaster : the culture of calamity from the Jamestown colony to the Johnstown flood / Cynthia A. Kierner.
Material type:
TextPublisher: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2019]Copyright date: ©2019Description: xiii, 285 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781469652511
- 146965251X
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | NonFiction | 303.485 K47 | Available | 33111009562071 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-273) and index.
Devastation without disaster -- Narrating disaster -- Catastrophe in an age of Enlightenment -- Benevolent empire -- Disaster nation -- Exploding steamboats and the culture of calamity.
"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"-- Provided by publisher.