Discussion Post 9: Steinberg, Bergman, etc.

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History Compass 6/3 (2008): 934–946, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00519.x

Disaster: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis

Jonathan Bergman University at Buffalo, SUNY

Abstract Disaster is one of those extraordinary phenomena that is ubiquitous yet indescribable. From supernatural occurrence to earthly force finally yielding to its present day configuration as a social event, disaster offers a unique lens with which to examine history. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, scholars set out to examine urban life, race, class, and politics through a variety of socially dislocating events. The historical literature is varied and deep. Conceptions of disaster are seldom the same, and often highlight the strained relationship between social and natural configurations. But historians examining disaster have not advocated a common creed of catastrophe, so much as sharing a familiar lexicon. That language is informed by social scientific literature, environmental studies, and topics such as urban life, race, class and politics. To be sure, the discourse of disaster has been quite supple, bridging disparate units of historical manufacture and blurring familiar categories of analysis. This article surveys the evolution of the term, its usage in American historiography and major scholarly trends. The article concludes with a cri de couer to bring greater visibility to disaster studies.

Disaster is one of those extraordinary phenomena that is ubiquitous yet indescribable.1 The images of death and destruction served up daily in print and on our TV screens elicit shock and horror, and with little afterthought we sometimes find ourselves saying: ‘How tragic . . . what a horrible “disaster” it truly is’.2 But the response is reflexive and without consideration of its underlying meaning. Associate Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court encountered the same problem with ‘obscenity’ famously commenting that ‘I could never succeed in intelligibly [defining it]. But I know it when I see it’.3 If only this simple test held true for disaster!

One of the first scholarly efforts to take up the challenge was Samuel Prince’s examination of the 1917 Halifax explosion.4 On the morning of December 6, 1917, the French wartime transport Mont Blanc collided with the Norwegian ship Imo in Halifax Harbor producing a blast equivalent to 3 kilotons of TNT and demolishing one-third of the cities of Dartmouth

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and Halifax.5 Prince, a Canadian scholar, pastor and social worker in Nova Scotia at the time, narrowly averted injury from the initial blast, tending to disaster victims and organizing relief services. Catastrophe and Social Change, adapted from his Ph.D. thesis from Columbia University, is a seminal work in disaster and the relief process based on his experiences during the event.6 After a prolonged gestation, the field of disaster studies began in earnest in the 1950s thanks to a U.S. government funded effort to study the effects of natural disasters on civilian populations for application in nuclear attack scenarios.7 The Committee on Disaster Studies, an offshoot of the National Academy of Sciences – National Research Council, was established to assist in the development of disaster research, chart societal aspects of these events, and extend grants for further study.8 The efforts of the Committee are also noteworthy for the creation of a self-sustaining disaster research regime, and seeding international scholarly efforts.9 When government funds dried up, the study was carried on by a variety of disciplines, including geography, anthropology, ecology, meteorology, psychology, sociology, and, more recently, history.10

But with over a half century of work in the social sciences, consensus is yet to be reached on the subject. In fact, its meaning is as elusive as ever. The title of a work edited by one of the founders of the Disaster Research Center (DRC), and the ‘Arch-Druid of Cataclysm’ according to the Boston Globe, E. L. Quarantelli, sums up the current debate succinctly – What is a Disaster?11 This question lies at the heart of modern disaster research. Indeed, whether it is explicitly mentioned or obliquely referenced, how one defines the term frames the landscape of disaster and shapes the particular study. From supernatural occurrence to earthly force finally yielding to its present day configuration as a social event, disaster offers a unique lens with which to examine history. These varying conceptions of disaster have been determinative in its presentation in modern scholarship. But historians examining disaster have not advocated a common creed of catastrophe, so much as sharing a familiar lexicon. That language is informed by social scientific literature, environmental studies, and topics such as race, class, and gender. To be sure, the discourse of disaster has been quite supple, bridging disparate units of historical manufacture and blurring familiar categories of analysis. This article surveys the evolution of the term, its usage in American historiography and major scholarly trends.

Early beliefs regarded disasters as ‘supernatural’ forces that bridged the earthly and the divine indicating God’s dissatisfaction with humanity.12

The Latin root of the word disaster (dis | astrum) literally translates to ‘bad star’ or ‘harbinger of doom’, and many people believed just that.13 Comets, tempests, hailstorms, and the like were not natural occurrences; they were mystical experiences steeped in moral meaning.14 But with the shift ‘in human thought from . . . religion to science’ dispassionate interpretations displaced spiritual ones.15 Maturing notions of the natural world would be the new polestar of disaster, firmly grounding the concept in secular

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terms.16 The first modern prescriptions linked these events to the presence of a physical agent. A natural discharge of hot magma, for instance, is identified as a volcanic eruption; and the detonation of an inert gas due to human meddling is called a chemical explosion.17 Other formulas stressed the physical consequences of disaster and the death and destruction wrought by these events. A common measuring stick that stubbornly persists to this day perhaps due to blind imitation or hideous curiosity is bound up in the physical detritus left in the wake of disaster – e.g., people killed and injured, buildings damaged and destroyed, dollars and property lost. But whether one examined the causes or effects of these events prior to the twentieth century, they were expressed in physical terms.18

More recently, scholars supplanted ecologically deterministic definitions with culturally driven models. Disasters came to be recognized as social events, occupying a meeting ground or ‘human ecology’ between human and non-human worlds.19 In the words of Matthew Mulcahy, ‘[d]isasters become disasters only when natural forces meet human ones’.20 Every phase and facet of the disaster process – e.g., causes, vulnerabilities, physical and social damage, emergency relief, and reconstruction – inhabits our social world. To be certain, the extensive use and connection of the natural world to modern society reveal an increasing fluidity between environmental and cultural boundaries. The character and extent of human participation in the natural world prompted E. L. Quarantelli to comment that ‘all “natural disasters” are social’.21 Theodore Steinberg maintains that the notion of ‘natural disaster’ is somewhat strained if not completely wrongheaded in ‘a society that has so thoroughly tampered with nature’.22 Modern disasters, Steinberg maintains, are ‘unnatural’ events with individuals and governments complicit in the production of links in the disaster chain.23

Through an analysis of the earthquakes, floods, and fires throughout California’s ‘destructive’ history, Mike Davis sees disaster as ‘unnatural’.24

Some scholars go even further arguing that disasters are entirely un-natural phenomena untethered from the non-human world. William McKibben, for instance, contends that we are living in a ‘post-natural’ world where nature has little or no effect on human affairs.25 While they all make a valid point, one should not be so quick to write off the impact of nature wholesale. Man’s stomping grounds are finite after all, and the world is replete with hazards; there is simply no place to go to escape the risks of the natural world, social imperatives notwithstanding. Even as cultural elements circumscribe the limits of a space’s use, disasters are referential to natural elements in their physical matrix. Thus natural events such as hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, and other extreme events still enjoy great explanatory value outside of their social milieu. Disasters therefore should be rightly understood as triggering mechanisms revealing flaws in environmental and social systems.26 While the force of a natural event is integral to the damage to social systems, economic, political, and cultural choice is equally determinative. Hence the force of these events

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is circumscribed by the capacity of social units to dynamically adjust before, during, and after the onset of the event.27 Disasters are, in some cases, fashioned by building codes and zoning laws, determined by the bureaucratic calculus of our leaders, formed by relief organizations, shaped by coastline (over or under) development, reflected in the dreams and nightmares of American culture, and produced by the fickle winds of the Caribbean.

Some early historical works, perhaps belatedly, examined the social and environmental make-up of disaster with positive results. Charles Rosenberg’s groundbreaking 1962 study of the great cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century presents disaster as a product of social and medical knowledge.28

Rosenberg’s study neatly displays the major conceptions of disaster with the 1832 outbreak acting as divine retribution, the 1849 flare up as the work of urban society, and finally the 1866 epidemic as a social problem to be fixed through the application of sanitary measures. David McCullough argues that the Johnstown Flood of 1889 was the result of Gilded Age hubris clashing with nature. He maintains that the notoriously unsafe dam created for the benefit of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club’s elite caused the death of over 2,000 men, women, and children. McCullough’s explicit tale of disaster is one of industrial irresponsibility and privilege subduing nature and the common man. Embedded within McCullough’s vivid prose, however, is a more complex portrait of disaster – the evolution of disaster relief embodied in the fledgling Red Cross, a social and natural landscape redrawn by disaster, old-hat America clashing with industry and the federal government, and the opportunity for individual and community renewal.29 Paul Bonnifield and Donald Worster, in strikingly different interpretations, examine the Dust Bowl catastrophe in depression-era Great Plains.30 Where McCullough’s view of disaster balances the natural and social elements at work in the Johnstown Flood, Worster and Bonnifield take an ‘all or nothing’ approach to the cause of the Dust Bowl. Bonnifield’s Dust Bowl reads like a Turnerian epic where romantic farmers and rough hewn individualists persevere in the face of hardship. This view is a throwback to ecologically deterministic tales, and rather than advance our understanding of the social creation of disaster, Bonnifield erects a wall between society and the environment. Conversely, Worster interprets the Dust Bowl as the ‘work of man, not nature’.31 He maintains that American capitalism was responsible for subduing, commodifying, and ultimately destroying the natural world. Kai Erikson and Gerald Stern view the Buffalo Creek disaster as a loss of community and a product of legal culture, respectively.32 That the majority of their tales are spent reconstructing what the community of Logan County, West Virginia, lost, and constructing what disaster bestowed upon them, displays the social bent of these studies.33

Until recently, works such as these were infrequent due to the lingering reluctance of historians to view disasters as anything more than exogenous forces. Indeed, although there is a general trend to adopt more culturally

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informed models of disaster, there was, and in some cases still is, a tendency to frame disaster in natural rather than social terms. Cherie Burn’s characterization of the ‘[t]he Great Hurricane of 1938’, for instance, ‘[as] one of the most powerful natural events in recorded history’ (emphasis mine) is a perfect illustration of this academic predisposition.34 While not disputing the sheer physical power of the storm, its place in history registers in social terms, and not natural ones. This view presents disaster as an autonomous force or ‘Act of God’ that merely acts upon society, taking it outside the limits of human control and sheltering from view civic, economic, political, and cultural life. The inclination to cast extreme events as self-directing powers is perhaps a holdover from more superstitious times when the disasters were associated with otherworldly forces. It has also reinforced a rather hackneyed narrative of disaster littered with the heroic exploits of brave men and submissive women taming the natural world. Furthermore, it could be argued that the great push towards social history and uncovering the ‘hidden and unsung’ voices of the past had, perhaps, the unintended consequence of burying these – less than social? – events. Whatever the cause, since some viewed disasters as natural events unconnected to human action, they were deemed to be ahistorical, and therefore, improper subjects of historical study.

With the advent of environmental studies, disasters have become something of a ‘growth field in American history’.35 Armed with novel theories of disaster, scholars have set out to examine urban life, race, class, politics, and governmental culture through a variety of socially dislocating events. Karen Sawislak’s Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 examines the social contours of disaster in Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871.36 Sawislak correctly finds that ‘social difference’ shaped the ‘destinies’ of those affected by the fire.37 The reconstruction effort revealed Chicago’s social disorder and the contest to contain disparate elements of pre-fire Chicago life. Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago traces the human ecology of disaster in a more modern Chicago.38 The Heat Wave of 1995 took several hundred lives with a disproportionate number of the elderly because, as Klinenberg argues, of a deteriorating urban infrastructure and the failure of public institutions and the mass media. Though thick on social scientific data, and probably too heavy as an introductory read, Klinenberg’s study is solidly supported. John Barry’s Rising Tide uses the Mississippi flood of 1927 to expose fissures in Delta society.39 According to Barry, what started out as a natural event turned into a social disaster shaped by race and class. Post-disaster management strategies revealed racial inequities between elite whites and poor blacks. The decision to purposefully break the levees, for instance, to save portions of the City of New Orleans and the commercial interests of wealthy landowners at the expense of flooding poorer and blacker regions, smacked of a social disaster of the worst kind.40 Coming out before Katrina and Rita, Barry’s conclusions are timely and provocative

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offering lessons for the physical and psychic restoration of the Gulf Coast. His narrative also makes for an interesting read along with his study of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.41 Stuart Schwartz, in ‘The Hurricane of San Ciriaco: Disaster, Politics, and Society in Puerto Rico, 1899–1901’, employs a two-pronged mode of disaster analysis. He not only uses the hurricane as a mirror to ‘reveal the underlying structures of social and political life’, but as an engine of the island’s transformation in subsequent years.42 Schwartz views the hurricane as a catalyst for social and economic tensions in Puerto Rican society. Yet his characterization of the hurricane is conspicuously silent on the natural elements of disaster at work in Puerto Rican society. Given Puerto Rico’s placement in an area of frequent hurricane activity, a more nuanced approach to the ecological components of disaster formation seems necessary.

Stephen Biel’s American Disasters contains a series of essays spanning colonial times to the present finding disaster in distinctly American applications of capital, faith, community, and possibility.43 Biel’s exploration of the varied ‘meaning’ of disaster can be found not only in cultural and political ideology, but in the evolution of relief regimes, engineering principles, and the news media. Biel’s text is an excellent introduction to disaster studies for the novice, which I use as a reader in my American Disaster History course at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Kevin Rozario’s The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America presents a cultural history of American disaster spanning from the Chicago Fire of 1871 to the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.44 In it, he charts the relationship and evolution of catastrophism alongside progressivism, sensationalism, and spirituality. Through disaster, Rozario argues, Americans were forced to confront the dark side of modernity. In response, American society invented disaster myths to help themselves ‘come to terms with the frightening and exhilarating new world . . . bequeathed to them’.45 Disaster, Rozario seems to suggest, was both destructive and constructive – its own most powerful tonic. Teresa Busby Jones’s ‘Hurricane Camille: Natural Disaster and Change on the Mississippi Coast’ presents a robust social and economic landscape in the wake of disaster. Jones argues that Hurricane Camille led to ‘many improvements in building codes, weather warnings, and planning’.46

Disaster, in this case, inspired Mississippians to develop the coast into a major tourist attraction, thus ensuring the economic vitality of the area, if not its environmental impenetrability. Disaster operated as a check on human exposure to hazard, and placed restrictions on development; but there was a tenuous balance in the community between the fear of future hurricanes and the desire to expand.47 And fast forward to a trio of works studying Hurricane Katrina. In Come Hell or High Water, Michael Eric Dyson uses Katrina as a looking glass for alleged American racism, the ignorance of poverty, and political and institutional malfeasance.48 Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires present a series of essays in There is No Such

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Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina ostensibly as a study on culture and regional planning, but reading more like a report on the failure of American social justice.49 Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast charts the institutional breakdowns in government during the relief operations after the storm from the City of New Orleans to the federal government.50

While at times these studies read more like jeremiads than thoughtful historical analyses, they succeed in presenting the raw emotion of Katrina that reverberates to the present day; and perhaps this is their greatest weakness. After reading these works, this reviewer was left questioning whether Hurricane Katrina is sufficiently ripe for study, or perhaps, if the subject is historically too ‘close’ to objectively examine. This also reveals a pitfall endemic to the study of these extreme events – the possibility of noxious political influence intruding into objective historical study due to the human drama associated with disaster.

The varied definitions and uses of disaster in historical literature have proved to be quite beneficial. Fires, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes are no longer treated as implacable forces of nature beyond the control of man, even as some still appeal to these tropes. Disaster is now rightly understood as an artifact of culture. The contours and color of disaster, and the pace and shape of reconstruction are appreciated as unique by-products of society. But just as society was ‘read out’ of disaster in earlier prescriptions, new disaster studies must be on guard not to write off the natural elements of disaster. A healthy balance must be found which appreciates the natural and social interactions that are manifest in modern disaster. Race, class, and gender also receive something of a facelift from the study of disaster. A subsidiary use of disaster, beyond its role as a category of analysis, is as a tool of historical study to enhance conventional historiographies and shine a fresh light on traditional topics.

As I have attempted to demonstrate, disaster studies have experienced some interesting developments and offer great lessons for historical scholarship, yet this reviewer is bedeviled by the suspicion that the subject has not formally ‘arrived’. Reconnaissances have been made, and initial volleys fired, but no scholarly introductions have been tendered on the historical field. Neither has there been a call for a sustained and rigorous discussion of its methods and values. Clearly, I am not the first to make this observation.51 Healthy self reflection and an interrogation of the methods and values of disaster research are needed if the study is to thrive. What theories and principles of historical disaster research are to be adopted? Will sociological models be modified for adaptation in the field or will a sui generis form emerge? Could disaster studies encompass a novel meta-historiographical category much like Atlantic history, or will it be included within Atlantic studies? Perhaps this piece will contribute in a modest way towards fruitful dialogue. At any rate, it may help to remember that the history of history is littered with notable discoveries

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and inaugurations – Turner had his frontier thesis, Scott gender analysis, Stearns and Stearns emotionology, Nye electricity, and Bernard Bailyn the Atlantic World.52 Bailyn’s observation of scholarly breakthroughs is particularly relevant and, I hope, portends a bright future for disaster studies.

there comes a moment when historians, wherever they may be located and whatever their personal backgrounds, blink their eyes and suddenly see within a mass of scattered information a new configuration that has a general meaning never grasped before, an emergent pattern that has some kind of enhanced explanatory power . . . Those glowing moments of illumination, suffusing at different times and in different ways the thoughts of many historians working on many problems, are where the real excitement lies.53

Acknowledgments

I would like to recognize the invaluable assistance, advice, and direction of my Professor, Michael Frisch, and peers in the History Department of the University at Buffalo, SUNY throughout my research into such a – pardon the pun – disastrous topic. And for my parents, thank you for believing in me through clear skies and rough gales.

Short Biography

Jonathan C. Bergman, is a doctoral student and instructor at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, Department of History, where he is finishing up a dissertation entitled, ‘The Shape of Disaster and The Universe of Relief: The “Hurricane of ’38” Relief Operations on Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, 1938–41’. He holds a B.A. from the University at Stony Brook, SUNY, and an M.A. in History from University at Buffalo, SUNY.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Department of History – University at Buffalo, SUNY, 546 Park Hall, Amherst, NY 14260, United States. Email: [email protected].

1 Carl Smith noted the indescribable quality of disaster in the fire relief literature of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. One commentator observed the event as ‘utterly incapable of verbal representation . . . It was impossible to describe something so “bewildering, exciting, electrifying, astounding and weirdly stupendous.” ’ Frank Luzerne, The Lost City! Drama of the Fire-Fiend! – or – Chicago, As It Was, and As It Is! and Its Glorious Future! (New York, NY: Wells, 1872), 66; qtd. in Carl Smith, Urban Disaster and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, and The Model Town of Pullman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 26. 2 For a brief discussion of the popular production, consumption, and use of disasters, see the introductory comments of Stephen Biel in American Disasters (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001), 1–8. 3 Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197 (1964), Justice P. Stewart, concurring. 4 Samuel Henry Prince, Catastrophe and Social Change, Based upon a Sociological Study of the Halifax Disaster (London: Kind and Son, 1920; reprint, New York, NY: AMS Press, 1968). 5 A kiloton is equal to one thousand tons, or two million pounds, of TNT. By way of comparison, the first atomic bomb dropped on the City of Hiroshima, the uranium-fueled Little

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Boy, had a destructive capacity of 13 kilotons, and the plutonium-powered Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki approximately 15 kilotons. The Halifax Disaster, therefore, possessed one quarter to one-fifth the explosive capacity of the world’s first atomic weapons. It was not until those two subsequent blasts that the destructive capacity of the Halifax explosion was surpassed. 6 ‘The Dr. Samuel Henry Prince Humanitarian Award’, Canadian Traumatic Stress Network, 2005, http://www.ctsn-rcst.ca/index.html#CTSN Home Page, accessed on August 12, 2007. 7 E. L. Quarantelli and Dennis Wenger, ‘Disaster: An Entry for an Italian Dictionary of Sociology’, Preliminary Paper #97 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center, 1985), 5. 8 Russell R. Dynes, ‘Cross-Cultural International Research: Sociology and Disaster’, International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, 6/2 (August 1988): 103. Of particular note is the work of the now defunct National Opinion Research Center (NORC), University of Chicago, 1950–1954, the extant Disaster Research Center (DRC), University of Delaware, Newark, and the National Hazards Center (NHC), University at Colorado, Boulder. The online resources of the latter two, in particular, proved to be invaluable in conceptualizing disaster and plumbing modern research for this project. See http://www.udel.edu/DRC/ and http://www.colorado.edu/ hazards/ for a sample of preliminary papers, newsletters, and opinions in this fascinating field. 9 Ibid. 10 For an excellent discussion of sociological theory and practice in disaster studies over the years see E. L. Quarantelli, ‘A Half Century of Social Science Disaster Research: Selected Major Findings and Their Applicability’, Preliminary Paper #336, a revised version of Preliminary Paper #280 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center, 2003), originally presented at the Hazards 2002 Conference, Antalya, Turkey October 3, 2002; Havidan Rodriguez, Tricia Wachtendorf, and Carla Dynes, ‘Disaster Research in the Social Sciences: Lessons Learned, Challenges, and Future Trajectories’, Preliminary Paper #338 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center, 2004), originally presented at the Disaster Research Center’s 40th Anniversary Conference. 11 David P. Aday and Satoshi Ito, ‘Social Structure and Disaster: A Prolegomenon’, in Gary Kreps (ed.), Social Structure and Disaster (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 19; E. L. Quarantelli (ed.), What is a Disaster: Perspectives on the Question (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998). 12 Russell Dynes, ‘The Lisbon Earthquake in 1755: The First Modern Disaster’, Preliminary Paper #255 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center, 1997), 2; Theodore Steinberg, ‘What is a Natural Disaster?’, Literature and Medicine, 15/1 (1996): 36. 13 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v. ‘disaster’. 14 It may help to consider the history of the northeastern American colonies in which every manner of ‘supernatural’ occurrence was visited upon early settlers. These events struck at the heart of colonial society demonstrating the great religious fervor that sustained them, and defined disaster. One such story is illuminating. During the Earthquake of 1638, a town meeting was in progress at Newbury, Massachusetts, which prompted the assembly to behold the ‘great and strange hand of God’s providence . . . leaving it on record to the view of after ages to the intent that all might take notice of Almighty God and fear his name’. That they were moved as such is revealing; that they did so amidst tremblers is miraculous. Sidney Perley, Historic Storms of New England (Salem, MA: Salem Press Publishing and Printing Company, 1891; reprint, Beverly, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 2001), 10. 15 David Alexander, Confronting Catastrophe (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), 67. 16 Debate exists over the shift in thought from superstitious to scientific explanations of disaster. Dynes argues that the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, or the ‘first modern disaster’ as he refers to it, initiated this process, with Steinberg holding that it was not realized until the late nineteenth century, although he does not rule out the possibility of overlap. Alexander does not dispute this process, but he envisions a more fluid typology with disaster myth and ritual coexisting with more modern formulations. Russell Dynes, ‘Seismic Waves in Intellectual Thought: The Uses of the Lisbon Earthquake in 18th Century Thought’, Preliminary Paper #272 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center, 1998); Dynes, ‘The Lisbon Earthquake in 1755: The First Modern Disaster’, Preliminary Paper #255 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center, 1997); Steinberg, ‘What is a Natural Disaster?’, 33–47.

http://www.ctsn-rcst.ca/index.html#CTSN

http://www.udel.edu/DRC/

http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/

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17 Quarantelli and Wenger, ‘Disaster’, 1–2. 18 Ibid. 19 Robert W. Kates, ‘Natural Hazard in Human Ecological Perspective: Hypotheses and Models’, Economic Geography, 47/3 (July 1971): 438. 20 Matthew Mulcahy, ‘Melancholy and Fatal Calamities: Natural Disasters and Colonial Society in the Greater British Caribbean, 1623–1781’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Minnesota, 1999), 6. See also Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 21 E. L. Quarantelli (ed.), What is a Disaster: Perspectives on the Question (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998); Russell Dynes, ‘Governmental Systems for Disaster Management’, Preliminary Paper #300 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center, 2000). 22 Steinberg, ‘What is a Natural Disaster?’, 34. 23 Theodore Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000); Steinberg, ‘Smoke and Mirrors: The San Francisco Earthquake and Seismic Denial’, in Biel (ed.), American Disasters, 103–26; Steinberg, ‘Do-It- Yourself-Deathscape: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in South Florida’, Environmental History, 2 (October 1997): 415–38. 24 Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999). See also Davis’s earlier work, The City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1992). 25 William McKibben, The End of Nature (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1989), 59. 26 Kates, ‘Natural Hazard in Human Ecological Perspective: Hypotheses and Models’, 438; Joanne M. Nigg, ‘The Social Impacts of Extreme Physical Events’, Preliminary Paper #245 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center, 1996); Gary R. Webb, ‘Individual and Organizational Response to Natural Disasters and Other Crisis Events: The Continuing Value of the DRC Typology’, Preliminary Paper #277 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center, 1999), originally presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Boston, Massachusetts, March 4–7, 1999. 27 James K. Mitchell, ‘Human Dimensions of Environmental Hazards: Complexity, Disparity, and the Search for Guidance’, in Andrew Kirby (ed.), Nothing to Fear: Risks and Hazards in American Society (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 136–9. 28 Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 29 David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood: The Incredible Story Behind One of the Most Devastating ‘Natural’ Disasters American Has Ever Known (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1968). 30 Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979); Paul Bonnifield, The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1979). 31 Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, 13. 32 Kai T. Erikson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Gerald M. Stern, The Buffalo Creek Disaster: How the Survivors of One of the Worst Disasters in Coal Mining History Brought Suit Against the Coal Company – and Won (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1977). 33 Interestingly, Stern’s book was required reading during my freshman year in law school. Not surprisingly, the Buffalo Creek disaster was presented in purely legal terms – as the anatomy of a lawsuit. As part of Civil Procedure I, our class followed the case of Prince v. Pittston Co., 63 F.R.D. 28 (S.D.W.Va., 1974) from filing to the terms of settlement. What strikes me to this day is the strange symmetry that existed between the physical event and the legal case with disaster literally supplying the letter of the law. This observation conforms to the theory of Justice O. W. Holmes, a fierce critic of ‘natural law’, who believed that individual cases and controversies were defined not by divine fiat but through the legal process. According to this view, the Pittston case ultimately defined the ‘law’ of the Buffalo Creek disaster as it wound its way through the courts. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law & Other Writings (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1881; reprint, Birmingham, AL: Legal Classics Library, 1982). 34 Cherie Burns, The Great Hurricane: 1938 (New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), 6. 35 Mulcahy, ‘Melancholy and Fatal Calamities’, 6.

944 Disaster: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis

36 Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 37 Ibid., 37. 38 Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 39 John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997). 40 Ibid. 41 John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2005). 42 Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘The Hurricane of San Ciriaco: Disaster, Politics, and Society in Puerto Rico, 1899–1901’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 72/3 (August 1992): 303. 43 Biel (ed.), American Disasters. 44 Kevin Rozario, The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 45 Kevin Rozario, ‘Nature’s Evil Dreams: Disaster in America, 1871–1906’, Ph.D. diss. (Yale University, 1996), 4. 46 Teresa Busby Jones, ‘Hurricane Camille: Natural Disaster and Change on the Mississippi Coast’, Master’s thesis (Mississippi State University, 1999), i. 47 Ibid. 48 Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Philadelphia, PA: Perseus Books Group, 2005). 49 Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires (eds.), There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006). 50 Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (New York, NY: William Morrow, 2006). 51 John Burnham, ‘A Neglected Field: The History of Natural Disasters’, American Historical Association’s Perspectives (April 1988): 22–4. 52 Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC: GPO and American Historical Association, 1894), 199–227; Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91/5 (December 1986): 1053–75; Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, The American Historical Review, 90 (October 1985): 813–36; David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 53 Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itenario, 20/1 (1996): 41.

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