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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Social impact of disasters
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1957 Fargo Tornado
(Hardcover)
Trista Raezer-Stursa, Lisa Eggebraaten, Jylisa Doney
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R781
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Discovery Miles 6 860
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With one million dead, and just as many forced to emigrate, the
Irish Famine (1845-52) is among the worst health calamities in
history. Because historical records of the Victorian period in
Ireland were generally written by the middle and upper classes,
relatively little has been known about those who suffered the most,
the poor and destitute. But in 2006, archaeologists excavated an
until then completely unknown intramural mass burial containing the
remains of nearly 1,000 Kilkenny Union Workhouse inmates. In the
first bioarchaeological study of Great Famine victims, Jonny Geber
uses skeletal analysis to tell the story of how and why the Famine
decimated the lowest levels of nineteenth century Irish
society.Seeking help at the workhouse was an act of desperation by
people who were severely malnourished and physically exhausted.
Overcrowded, it turned into a hotspot of infectious disease--as did
many other union workhouses in Ireland during the Famine. Geber
reveals how medical officers struggled to keep people alive, as
evidenced by cases of amputations but also craniotomies. Still,
mortality rates increased and the city cemeteries filled up, until
there was eventually no choice but to resort to intramural burials.
Deceased inmates were buried in shrouds and coffins--an attempt by
the Board of Guardians of the workhouse to maintain a degree of
dignity towards these victims. By examining the physical conditions
of the inmates that might have contributed to their
institutionalization, as well as to the resulting health
consequences, Geber sheds new and unprecedented light on Ireland's
Great Hunger.
A timely ethnography of how Indonesia's coastal dwellers inhabit
the "chronic present" of a slow-motion natural disaster Ice caps
are melting, seas are rising, and densely populated cities
worldwide are threatened by floodwaters, especially in Southeast
Asia. Building on Borrowed Time is a timely and powerful
ethnography of how people in Semarang, Indonesia, on the north
coast of Java, are dealing with this global warming-driven
existential challenge. In addition to antiflooding infrastructure
breaking down, vast areas of cities like Semarang and Jakarta are
rapidly sinking, affecting the very foundations of urban life:
toxic water oozes through the floors of houses, bridges are
submerged, traffic is interrupted. As Lukas Ley shows, the
residents of Semarang are constantly engaged in maintaining their
homes and streets, trying to live through a slow-motion disaster
shaped by the interacting temporalities of infrastructural failure,
ecological deterioration, and urban development. He casts this
predicament through the temporal lens of a "meantime," a managerial
response that means a constant enduring of the present rather than
progress toward a better future-a "chronic present." Building on
Borrowed Time takes us to a place where a flood crisis has already
arrived-where everyday residents are not waiting for the effects of
climate change but are in fact already living with it-and shows
that life in coastal Southeast Asia is defined not by the
temporality of climate science but by the lived experience of tidal
flooding.
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