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.
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