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Plague and Fire - Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu's Chinatown (Paperback, New Ed)
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Plague and Fire - Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu's Chinatown (Paperback, New Ed)
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A little over a century ago, bubonic plague--the same Black Death
that decimated medieval Europe--arrived on the shores of Hawaii
just as the islands were about to become a U.S. territory. In this
absorbing narrative, James Mohr tells the story of that fearful
visitation and its fiery climax--a vast conflagration that engulfed
Honolulu's Chinatown.
Mohr tells this gripping tale largely through the eyes of the
people caught up in the disaster, from members of the white elite
to Chinese doctors, Japanese businessmen, and Hawaiian reporters.
At the heart of the narrative are three American physicians--the
Honolulu Board of Health--who became virtual dictators when the
government granted them absolute control over the armed forces and
the treasury. The doctors soon quarantined Chinatown, where the
plague was killing one or two people a day and clearly spreading.
They resisted intense pressure from the white community to burn
down all of Chinatown at once and instead ordered a careful,
controlled burning of buildings where plague victims had died. But
a freak wind whipped one of those small fires into a roaring
inferno that destroyed everything in its path, consuming roughly
thirty-eight acres of densely packed wooden structures in a single
afternoon. Some 5000 people lost their homes and all their
possessions and were marched in shock to detention camps, where
they were confined under armed guard for weeks.
Next to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Chinatown fire is
the worst civic disaster in Hawaiian history. A dramatic account of
people struggling in the face of mounting catastrophe, Plague and
Fire is a stimulating and thought-provoking read.
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