Discussion Post 5: Mizelle, Grego, and Vann
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FEBRUARY 2018 | TAH.OAH.ORG
ALSO INSIDE
Twitter and the Historical Profession
Teaching U.S. History Abroad
Disaster History
The American Historian O R G A N I Z A T I O N O F A M E R I C A N H I S T O R I A N S
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HISTORIANS’ PERSPECTIVES ON THE RISE OF DONALD J. TRUMP
Historians worry about our discipline. Graphs and tables confirm what we all feel—that we are losing students and majors, that jobs are declining in number and security, that our relative position within colleges and universities is waning.
Despite these challenges, ironically, the writing and interpreting of American history has never been richer, broader, or more vibrant. Our crisis is not an intellectual crisis, or a failure of imagination, creativity, or compelling ideas. Powerful new books and interpretations continually appear, museums and public historians present exciting interpretations, people seek out podcasts and videos inspired by history, and various forms of digital history weave their way into classrooms and scholarship. Historians are often among the most influential teachers at all kinds of institutions and engage as citizens and advocates.
Our challenge, then, as we worry about fading importance, is not one of content or creativity but of connection. History needs, more than anything, to find ways to get its work, in all its forms, before more people.
Our largest potential audiences are those to which we already have the most direct access: students. Students’ lives are changed by what they discover in history classrooms, sometimes in ways they recognize at the time and sometimes in ways they discover later. Thousands of historians, in all kinds of institutions, teach exciting, memorable, and popular courses to students of all ages and backgrounds. Superb lecturers and skilled discussion leaders—some tenure-track and some not—animate community colleges, liberal arts schools, regional universities, and elite institutions. Public historians teach hundreds of students that arrive on memorable field trips and people who spend their vacations learning about the past.
Such an active and creative field need not dwell on a romanticized vision of what we once had. The era of plentiful tenure-track jobs hardly knew the vastly more inclusive profession we’ve built and the increasingly diverse students we’ve met in these years of narrowing job prospects. We have seen crucial gains as well as disheartening losses. Our
goal now should be to create new opportunities within a more democratic profession. Teachers who are graduate students, visitors, or adjuncts need to be welcomed and supported as the colleagues they are. Hard-pressed colleges and schools deserve a more prominent place in our conception of what history is and can do.
College-level historians can collaborate more effectively with our colleagues in secondary schools. Those who teach juniors in high school and those who teach freshmen in college see their work increasingly overlap as dual enrollment and the Advanced Placement tests displace the United States survey class in college. That survey remains important, though, for the John N. Gardner Institute has discovered that a significant number of first-generation students drop out of higher education altogether after they receive a low or failing grade in an introductory history course. Surveys and other introductory courses need to consider their influence beyond the classroom, for they reach large numbers of first- generation and part-time students. Fortunately, we have help in thinking about these issues from organizations such as the National Council for History Education, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and from the National Humanities Center’s Education Programs work to connect secondary and post-secondary teaching.
While our classrooms offer uniquely powerful possibilities, we can also think more creatively about ways to reach audiences beyond our institutions. Here, as in imagining a time when history was more powerful within our institutions, there is no use in longing for a mythical golden age of public intellectuals when, in reality, a few white men in elite institutions spoke for the discipline. Just as we are not likely to secure significant new funding for our departments or institutions by repeating familiar—if true—refrains about the importance of the liberal arts, neither are we likely to persuade mass market magazines and newspapers to review more works of history or to persuade producers of talk shows to introduce unfamiliar authors or topics by arguing that they
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had done so at some point in the past. Instead, we need to recognize that we live in a much
more promising environment than we did in the era of few magazines and television networks. Today we can create new channels of connection and discovery for ourselves. Historians can build our own audiences with our own ingenuity and passion. We can be more active advocates for ourselves and for each other, promoting and sharing our work more broadly. We can take responsibility for making the most of what we have to offer.
Historians have a record of such forward-looking action. H-Net has long provided thoughtful book reviews and places for collaboration on scholarship and teaching. The History News Network connects and publicizes work in the field. The Process blog of the Organization of American Historians offers a new platform for disciplinary conversation. Black Perspectives, curated by the African American Intellectual History Society, has become a vibrant place for exchange and new scholarship. I am involved in two projects that reach out: Bunk shares articles, blogs, podcasts, visualizations, objects, and other representations of the American past; and BackStory, a podcast about American history, introduces a broad audience to the voices of historians of many backgrounds and specializations. New history blogs and podcasts are continually being created, finding and making new audiences.
One of the most effective new platforms for connecting historians with broad and immediate audiences is Made by History, sponsored by the Washington Post. More than seventy-five historians from a broad range of institutions contribute to the collaborative, edited by Brian Rosenwald of the University of Pennsylvania and Nicole Hemmer of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, joined by Kathryn Cramer Brownell of Purdue University. Launched in June 2017, articles from Made by History have already been read by over three million people. Its purpose is to show that “in order to make history, we first have to understand how history has made us.” As the editors write, “Sometimes, that will mean explaining the origins of policy battles; sometimes, it will involve illuminating the social and cultural pathways that led our society to fracture in just this way; other times, it will mean grappling with parallels between the past and present.” In other words, Made by History demonstrates the broad range of ways that history matters. The effort, a model of the kind of partnerships that historians can build, is cosponsored by Purdue, Oregon State, and Villanova, as well as by Cambridge University Press, the University of North Carolina Press, and the American Political History Institute.
The Organization of American Historians itself holds great promise for mobilizing the strength of historians of the United States. The OAH is flourishing. The Journal of American History publishes groundbreaking work, The American Historian reaches out to new audiences, and the Annual Meeting promotes the diversity and vitality of our profession every year.
In my time on the board, I have developed an appreciation for what the Organization of American Historians is doing and can do. I have seen the creativity, commitment, and skill the staff of the OAH bring to their work every day. I have seen the investment that colleagues from across the profession, in all its variety, make in our shared enterprise by serving on committees, helping to build membership, reviewing manuscripts and books, and making local arrangements for the Annual Meeting. The amount of work and creativity involved in assembling the program for that meeting each year is enormous but heartening, revealing the energy within our profession.
The OAH is positioned to take on ambitious new efforts. A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities is allowing us to take stock of the strengths and possibilities of the Organization, to think about ways we can best focus our energies. Two grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are permitting us to think in fresh ways about how to share the intellectual resources of American historians. The Amplified Initiative at the Annual Meeting in Sacramento will give us a chance to collaborate in more concrete ways with the public historians and secondary teachers among us, while a new database will share our expertise more broadly with journalists looking for historical perspective. The Organization of American Historians works as a partner with the American Historical Association, the National Humanities Alliance, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other groups that advocate for history.
The OAH occupies a crucial position between the global reach of the American Historical Association and the regional, period, or topical focus of smaller groups that play an important role in fostering the work of Americanists. The Organization gathers over seven thousand historians who share a common passion and purpose. Whether they work in colleges or universities, high schools or museums, government or business, on their own or with others, all historians of the United States have a place in the OAH. This broad and diverse alliance can be a unique voice for history in our nation.
Even as we work to expand our other capacities, the members of the OAH produce the most rigorous and original explorations of the American past. History is better because it is a discipline, building on the work of those who came before and posing new questions for those who follow. Working within our discipline’s best traditions, the OAH advances knowledge, generates innovation, fosters work in progress, provides venues for sharing new ideas, trains aspiring historians, supports emerging and independent scholars, encourages diversity, and builds commonality among writers, teachers, and public historians.
The Organization of American Historians, in short, plays an indispensable and irreplaceable role. Our traditional virtues will grow stronger as we connect with new allies and audiences, and as we find new ways to speak to and listen to the nation whose history we explore. Each of us, in our own way, can take advantage of these possibilities. TAH
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The American Historian NUMBER 15: FEBRUARY 2018
CONTENTS
FEATURES
21 “Disasters Have Histories” Teaching and Researching American Disasters Chad H. Parker, Andy Horowitz, and Liz Skilton
30 International Expertise and Its Discontents: What Disaster History Can Show about the Progressive Era Jacob Remes
36 Making Sense of Disasters in Early America— and Today Matthew Mulcahy
43 The Origins of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance Julia F. Irwin
FROM THE PRESIDENT
1 The Possibilities of American History Edward L. Ayers
FROM THE ARCHIVES
8 Making Race Visible in the Disaster Archive Richard M. Mizelle Jr.
THE CRAFT OF TEACHING
13 OAH China Residency Nathan J. Citino
DIGITAL EDGE
16 Twitter and the Historical Profession John Fea
DEPARTMENTS 4 CONTRIBUTORS
6 ANTE
26 ANNUAL MEETING NEWS
50 NEWS OF THE OAH
52 POST
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CONTRIBUTORS EDWARD L. AYERS is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities at the University of Richmond and the current OAH president. He is the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the Bancroft Prize, and National Professor of the Year.
NATHAN J. CITINO is an Associate Professor of History at Rice University. He is the author of From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Sa’ud, and the Making of U.S.-Saudi Relations (2002) and Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S.-Arab Relations, 1945–1967 (2017).
JOHN FEA teaches American history at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. You can follow him @johnfea1.
ANDY HOROWITZ is an Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University and is writing a history of Katrina for Harvard University Press. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2014.
JULIA F. IRWIN is an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on the role of humanitarian assistance in twentieth century U.S. foreign relations. She is the author of Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (2013).
RICHARD M. MIZELLE JR. is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Houston. His research and teaching focuses on the history of medicine, environment, and race in America.
MATTHEW MULCAHY teaches history and is chair of the department at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of Hurricanes and Society in the British Caribbean, 1624–1783 (2006) and most recently, Hubs of Empire: The Southeastern Lowcountry and British Caribbean (2014).
CHAD H. PARKER is Associate Professor of History and SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
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JACOB REMES is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. He is the author of Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (2016).
LIZ SKILTON is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Environmental History and the the J. J. Burdin and Helen Burdin/BORSF Endowed Professor in Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She specializes in the history of disaster and human response to it. Her forthcoming book, Tempest: Hurricanes and American Culture, reviews the effect of the hurricane naming system on the perception and reaction to storms.
On the Cover: A depiction of the disaster at Conemaugh Valley, Pennsylvania, a result of the Johnston Flood of 1889. Courtesy Library of Congress
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ANTEANTE
Meredith Baker @BereanMere In southern history, the Richmond Theater Fire in 1811 as example of either 19th c resistance to preventative regulations or post disaster cultural/religious change in society
Danielle L. McGuire @dmcguire13 Historians are detectives. Nothing is ever put together for you; no story comes in whole cloth. You find threads. You pull them and see where they take you. I started researching Recy Taylor in 2003. It took me more than seven years to stitch together the story that @Oprah told.
A: Responses to our previous question: What disasters, natural or otherwise, do you like to teach in your history classes?
How do you incorporate the history of the Carribean into your U.S. history classes?
Please e-mail your response to [email protected] or tweet to @theamhistorian. We’ll print your responses in the next issue, and we’ll post a new question.
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Rogue Americanist @thesenci The rise and fall of American cultural imperialism.
David Maloney The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 is a great topic for a number of reasons. The destruction of the city of Galveston by the storm led to ascension of Houston as the dominant city for trade in the area because of what many perceived to be its “safe” location inland. Hurricane Harvey, the great storm of 2017, certainly made many reexamine that thought. The destruction of 1900 resulted in the construction of a miles long seawall and the actual raising of the city by 17 feet, a great place to discuss the results of urban planning with students as the 20th century began. Lastly, since it occurred during the age of imperialism, it is important to discuss with students the fact that the warnings of the Cuban forecasters were ignored by the American meteorologists because of the entrenched racism of the period.
#Twitterstorians Historian Danielle McGuire tweeted the following after Oprah Winfrey told the story of Recy Taylor at her Golden Globes speech in January 2018.
Courtesy Library of Congress
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According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), natural disasters cost the United States a record $306 billion in 2017, breaking the previous high of $215 billion set in 2005. All told, the United States experienced sixteen events categorized as natural disasters (events where overall the damage/costs exceeds $1 billion) in 2017, including “one drought event, two flooding events, one freeze event, eight severe storm events, three tropical cyclone events, and one wildfire event. Overall, these events resulted in the deaths of 362 people.” Stretching back to 1980, the United States has experienced 216 such events and these natural disasters have cost the country an estimated $1.5 trillion.
Credit: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/overview
Juan Rodriguez (or Jan Rodrigues), born in Santa Domingo (what is now the Dominican Republic) to a Portuguese sailor and an African mother, became the first documented non-Native American to live on
Manhattan Island when he arrived in 1613 on board a Dutch exploration ship. Known for his linguistic talents, Rodriguez was enlisted by Dutch captain Thijs Volckenz Mossel to learn the Algonquin language of the native
Lenape people to better facilitate trade. When the Dutch ship left, Rodriguez stayed behind and set up a trading post with supplies left by Mossel. Rodriguez reportedly married into the Lenape community, and some
historical evidence suggests he lived on Manhattan Island into the 1640s. Regardless of how long Rodriguez lived in Manhattan, he is one of the first examples of the long history of diverse immigrants who have come to
the United States and made the country their home.
New York’s First Immigrant
Information from “The Life of Jan Rodrigues,” https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/jan-rodrigues.htm, and Anthony Stevens- Acevedo, Tom Weterings, and Leonor Alvarez Francés, “Juan Rodriguez and the Beginnings of New York City,” CUNY Academic Works (2013),
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/dsi_pubs/17.
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Making Race Visible in the Disaster Archive
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Richard M. Mizelle Jr.
The 1927 Mississippi River flood remains one of the most significant disasters in history. Flooding uprooted the lives of thousands of people in the Mississippi Valley region and resulted in billions of dollars of economic and property loss. The 1927 flood was also a window into racial inequality. The suffering of black people during the disaster was exacerbated by racism that prevented them from moving freely after the flood and from accessing the federal government through forms of charity in the same way that other groups of people could. Yet African Americans also experienced additional suffering well after the flood waters
receded in the form of archival absences brought about by the deliberate silencing of their voices and stories. Making visible the stories and experiences of African American and other non-white survivors of environmental disasters has been a significant part of my historical research. My work also confronts the archive for these absences and the difficulties historians encounter attempting to write about race and disasters. This essay highlights the evolution of my thinking regarding disasters and archives, including a family story that in many ways set the stage for my interest in disasters.
Much of what I write and teach, in hindsight,
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An image of the destruction caused by the 1927 Mississippi flood. African Americans were especially hit hard not only by the physical flooding but also by the systematic and intentional silencing of their stories and memories of the traumatic event, absences which are still apparent in the archive.
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is spurred along by my own family stories and history. Growing up I always heard of how my maternal grandmother, Dorothy Brown, survived the great Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus fire of 1944 in Hartford, Connecticut. To this day it remains the worst circus fire in American history.1 Not long after the lions finished performing on the afternoon of July 6, the several thousand spectators enjoying the circus under the big rooftop tent noticed flames streaking up its side walls and on to the roof. Survivors later recalled that people initially remained calm, but erupted into absolute chaos when the smoke appeared. As the band continued to play, spectators jumped from the bleachers and trampled over each other in search of exits. Within a matter of minutes the top of the tent came burning down on spectators. Hundreds of people were injured and the death toll was placed at around 167, but most who have written about this disaster suggest that, when taking into consideration the individual body parts found on the scene, people who might have died from complications of smoke inhalation or burns not officially recorded, and the poor transient population that often frequented these types of events that no one would have claimed, this number is far too low. I would also add that black and non-white victims might have been under-recorded or flat out ignored in the official death
toll. The death toll for disasters is an important archive and the official absenting of African Americans from these records is a form of structural violence upon bodies.
Unfortunately, I never asked my grandmother questions about surviving the fire before she passed. Though we can never know if a person wants to talk about an experience like this, I should have gotten a tape-recorder and tried. Maybe she would have loved to talk about this to her grandson who was interested in history. Far too often we do not ask these questions, and, coupled with the fact that past archives were uninterested in documenting these voices for historians and the public, the result is that many of these voices are being lost, making it difficult for historians who write about disasters to find first- hand African American voices in traditional archives.
The story that my mother remembered and passed down to me about that day is telling about race, disasters, and the limitations of the disaster archive, particularly the opportunities that are lost when these voices are not recorded. My grandmother was caring for the young child of a white family in Florida when she accompanied them to Hartford in 1944. Apparently she took the child to the circus alone and was sitting in the bleachers when the fire broke out. Instead of heading for one of the exits, my grandmother
opted to dig underneath the tent and, in the process of saving herself, also saved the life of the young child. There are so many questions I would love to ask her about that day: What were you doing when the fire first broke out? What were other people doing? Were other African Americans attending the circus? Were you sitting in a segregated section, or did the fact that you were caring for a white child give you access to other sections? Did anybody help you escape, and if so, how? Were you physically injured that afternoon? What happened after you escaped the flames? Did anybody tend to you? How long did you stay in contact with the family whose child you saved? Did you suffer any lasting psychological trauma from the disaster? I would have so many more questions, though it is certainly difficult to ask these questions of survivors, even family members, who have dealt with such traumatic events. Thinking about these questions led to my own historical interest in showing what these traumatic moments might reveal about American society during the 1927 Mississippi flood, and the ways in which the silences that envelope powerless victims of disasters follow them into the historical archive.
The 1927 Mississippi River flood remains one of the most commemorated disasters in American history. Few other disasters evoked as widespread a political, social, and cultural response. The flood led to
Yet African Americans also experienced additional suffering well after the flood waters receded in the form of archival
absences brought about by the deliberate silencing of their voices and stories.
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the massive 1928 Flood Control Act, which significantly altered flood control policy in the United States and influenced presidential elections. At the same time, blues musicians and novelists such as Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, Memphis Minnie, and Richard Wright highlighted the intricacies of black experiences during the disaster. Ordinary citizens throughout the country responded to the disaster in a number of ways, including sending money for relief and writing letters to newspapers to express outrage at the treatment of flood survivors. When researching disasters from the early twentieth century, newspaper coverage (though sensational at times) remains an important window into understanding events and how they were framed for a broader public.
The 1927 Mississippi River flood occurred when excessive amounts of rain fell in the Mississippi Valley beginning in the fall of 1926 and did not stop until the late spring of 1927. The damage was staggering, as levees buckled up and down the Mississippi River and its tributaries, releasing flood waters over roughly 1,100 square miles of landscape in the seven states of Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Illinois, and Louisiana. Importantly, the disaster revealed racial tensions and anxieties deep within the Mississippi Delta region around questions of citizenship and mobility. Red Cross relief camps were set up in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana that served as both a source of charity and institutional control over black flood sufferers. 2 Black flood survivors were held hostage in these camps for upwards of four months as planters and politicians in the Mississippi Delta region feared the loss of labor.
The writings and correspondence of white planters and politicians in the Delta region clearly revealed their anxieties over African Americans
using the flood as an opportunity to migrate out of the flooded region. The 1927 flood occurred in the midst of the Great Migration, a moment when black southerners were already leaving for Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other cities. Not everyone went to cities, as some migrants left the rural South for the not-so-rural South, going from Virginia farmlands to the industrial center of Norfolk, and from rural Louisiana and Texas to Houston (an important route linking the 1927 flood to the Great Migration that I was able to track).3 When taking into account the broader history of the Great Migration, common sense suggests that migration from the Delta region to Chicago must have also occurred during the 1927 flood. Using the 1927 flood as a window into this larger migration is part of why I am drawn to this disaster. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I became interested in questions of displacement as well, particularly regarding how disruptions in a society can influence perceptions of home, place, and feelings of familiarity and belonging. More people stayed than left the Delta region after the flood. Displacement is not always about moving to another place. It can also be about how the world around you changes after an environmental disaster.4
White landowners were clearly less concerned about feelings of displacement than with preventing African American sharecroppers from fleeing the region and breaking those unscrupulous contracts that kept them tied mercilessly to the land. They also depended on the labor of African Americans for building and maintaining levees, constructing railroads, working at logging and turpentine camps, and domestic servitude. Historian Talitha L. LeFlouria shows the ways in which the convict-lease system of the early
twentieth century was employed in southern states to create financial incentives for the incarceration and criminalization of black men and women, squeezing their ability to move freely across the landscape.5 It was not simply that white planters prevented the free movement of black flood survivors. African Americans were treated like criminals for no other reason than for being black. Guns pointed, movement restricted, hungry, wet, and forced to work on levees when exhausted: this was, in essence, the convict-lease system shaped by an environmental disaster. One of the ways they attempted to control the movement of African American flood survivors was with the disciplining tool of hunger. Access to food was scarce after the disaster, and fear of debilitating nutritional diseases like pellagra was high. As a result, local white planters restricted access to donated food and resources for African Americans as a way of keeping them in place.
When writing about the 1927 flood, talking explicitly about the absences within the traditional archive serves not simply as a way to justify the sources I employ—blues music and historical fiction are certainly able to stand on their own —but as a way to explain what African Americans during that particular disaster endured.6 The fact that black survivors could not talk freely or move openly in the aftermath of the 1927 flood was a matter of structural violence and continues to be violent today in the ways that historians must piece together into narratives using fragmented source materials. Instead of ignoring the obvious absences within the official record, I made the traditional archive an important part of the disaster narrative by asking why black survivors of the 1927 flood remain so invisible.
There is no body of letters
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or published (or unpublished) manuscripts of black flood survivors. The violence and surveillance they experienced during the disaster made this difficult and for much of the twentieth century archives were uninterested in cataloguing such narratives. Oral history could have been an important intervention if repositories were interested in recording the stories of black survivors at a time when their memories of the disaster were fresh, but, unfortunately, most were not. As a result, we lack evidentiary first-hand narratives of what black people experienced during the 1927 flood, which the historical record now clearly shows was quite different from the experiences of whites and other groups of people in the Delta. How did they survive the flood? Did they stay inside Red Cross relief camps, and, if so, what were their experiences? What did the food taste like inside these camps? How did they deal with loss if a family member or friend died during the disaster? What feelings of anger did they have or display when dealing with whites or other flood survivors, or if forced into peonage without compensation?
In her book on enslaved women in eighteenth-century Barbados, historian Marisa J. Fuentes defines the concept of “fugitive knowledge” where those enslaved experienced violence during slavery and in the historical archive. The absence of enslaved voices in the archive is a form of structural and systematic violence directed once again upon
the bodies of those long dead.7 The theory of “fugitive knowledge” can be applied to the 1927 flood as well. The ways in which the voices and experiences of African Americans during the flood were documented are representative of the ways that suffering during other disasters can make its way into the historical archive.8 All historians come face to face with dead-ends, absences, fragments, incompletes, utterances that could mean this or that, and silences in the record that blare like loudspeakers when sitting in a dusty archive. In many ways, this is the fun part: following a trail of information and knowledge to reconstruct the past and make readable that which is content to stay hidden. Yet there are moments in which we must confront the archive for what it is, an ideological and social construction that re-inscribes suffering through silences in the record.
These absences can nonetheless make it difficult for disaster historians to write about social history and spectacle. People are oddly fascinated with disasters. Yet, as historian Ted Steinberg wrote many years ago, there is clearly an “unnatural” history of natural disasters that becomes evident through the groups of people suffer the most.9 Disaster historians are often interested not just showing the carnage and disruptive nature of disasters, but also in the evidentiary knowledge of those who survive. When documenting disasters we want to know, say, what kinds of unusual smells the 1871 Great Chicago Fire
unleashed. We want to know what a people were doing when the world began to shake during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The smell of floodwaters and sound of water breaking floodwalls or levees during the 1900 Great Galveston Storm or 1935 Labor Day hurricane are powerful because such descriptions disclose relationships of power along with interactions with the local, state, and federal government. In other words, these voices are important for developing an understanding of the political, social, and cultural history of disasters in particular spaces and moments in time.
Increasingly, historians are thinking about what disasters can tell us about the historical past and the relationships of power between individuals, groups of people, and institutions. Since the late 1970s, monographs and articles on environmental disasters including the Johnstown floods, Buffalo Creek Disaster, 1927 Mississippi River flood, 1871 Great Chicago Fire, 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and 1995 Chicago heat wave among others have made important contributions to United States social, cultural, and environmental history.10 At the same time, scholars began thinking much more about the role of the federal government in disaster relief and mitigation. One driving question of this research is this: When did the federal government open the doors of the federal bureaucracy to help citizens in need?11 By the 1990s, scholarly interest in
The fact that black survivors could not talk freely or move openly in the aftermath of the 1927 flood was a matter of
structural violence.
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disasters occurred at a time in which environmental history was maturing as a field. Environmental history reified the broader themes of historical inquiry, including questions of race, class, and gender in the construction of knowledge around people’s interactions with the environmental world. Such questions reflected thinking about how individuals and groups of people influenced and were influenced by the environmental world, and how people manipulated and interpreted
environmental landscapes for clues to their own desires and well-being.12
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, scholars and institutions took it upon themselves to record the stories of survivors, in the process creating rich archives for the public and historians to consider. The same seems to be true in the aftermath of the recent spate of storms during the fall of 2017. In some cases, professors make assignments where students learn about and conduct oral interviews in the community,
providing invaluable classroom skills while simultaneously creating a body of knowledge. Public history programs and centers have also taken up the mantle by creating local history projects centered around the survivors of disasters that have impacted the local environment. The result is that, collectively, we have all begun to think more critically about the absences in the historical archive and about finding ways to address these silences. TAH
ENDNOTES 1. Stewart O’Nan, The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy (2000). Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief:
The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymaker Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (1995). Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Chicago Fire, 1871–1874 (1995).
2. Pete Daniel, Deep’n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood (1977); John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America (1997); Richard M. Mizelle Jr., Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination (2014).
3. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (1991); Bernadette Pruitt, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900–1941 (2013).
4. John R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989). 5. Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2015). 6. Mizelle Jr., Backwater Blues. 7. Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016). 8. Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (2000). 9. Ibid. 10. Kai T. Erickson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (1976); David McCullough, The
Johnstown Flood: The Incredible Story Behind One of the Most Devastating “Natural” Disasters America Has Ever Known (1987); Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (2002).
11. Karen M. O’Neill, Rivers by Design: State Power and the Origins of U.S. Flood Control (2006). 12. Conevery Bolton Valenčius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (2002).
Visit us online at
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OAH China Residency
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Nathan J. Citino
I made my first trip to China in the summer of 2017. In fact, I had one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career participating in the Organization of American Historians’ China Residency Program. I led a seminar on American foreign policy since World War II and the history of the international Cold War for graduate students and faculty who came from different parts of China. The China Residency program, now in its fifth year, is sponsored by the Ford Foundation. My seminar was held at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an during the week of June 19–23, 2017. By describing this trip, I hope not only to promote interest in the China Residency program but also to add to the store of knowledge shared by U.S. historians who have taught overseas.
For many reasons, this opportunity came at an interesting time. The election of Donald J. Trump raised expectations for a more nationalist, “America First” foreign policy defined in part by a more confrontational approach toward China. In terms of scholarship, Cold War historians are studying the role of China more and more, and recognizing increasingly its global importance alongside the United States and the Soviet Union. Although I specialize in U.S.– Middle East relations and conduct research in Arabic, I was aware that numerous historians, some based in China and others in the United States, were incorporating Chinese sources into scholarship published in English. Finally, many recent histories, including those focused on the Asia-Pacific region, have reconstructed past
transnational networks by which people, goods, capital, and ideas crossed national borders. The China Residency offered me a walk-on role in just such a network, as I established ties to historians in China and Chinese scholars came to U.S. institutions as part of an exchange administered by the OAH and the American History Research Association of China (AHRAC). Politics, scholarship, and pedagogy came together to make for an eye-opening encounter with Chinese colleagues. I gained a fresh perspective on my own field and witnessed how national politics could affect transnational links. In sum, I learned as well as taught.
I interpreted my role in the seminar not simply as presenting material from my existing courses, but as representing the state of the field in English-language scholarship to a non-U.S. audience. Therefore, I read most of the three- volume Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010), as well as important recent monographs by Timothy Nunan, Gregg Brazinsky, Carol Anderson, Guy Laron, and Nancy Mitchell. I tried to get up to speed on U.S.-China relations scholarship. I also supplemented my existing knowledge of literature on U.S. labor, civil rights, and cultural history in a Cold War context, and collected primary sources available through the National Security Archive, the U.S. State Department Office of the Historian, the Cold War International History Project, and the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. I spent months preparing, and it paid off in the sense that it allowed me to more effectively advise
I interpreted my role in the seminar not simply as presenting material from my existing courses, but as
representing the state of the field in English-language scholarship to a non-U.S. audience.
F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | T h e A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i a n 1 3
Chinese students on historiography. It also gave me the opportunity as a mid-career scholar to refresh my knowledge.
Over the five days of the seminar, I planned to cover the origins of the Cold War; the Cold War and U.S. society; the Cold War in the Third World; crises in Cuba and Vietnam; and the end of the Cold War. My hosts wanted me to lead the seminar for six hours per day for five days, mostly by lecturing. They otherwise gave me latitude in organizing the schedule, although, unsure as I was about participants’ abilities with English, I was limited in the amount of reading I could assign and the extent of discussion I could expect. I decided to assign one or two article-length readings per day, with some short primary sources to supplement. About three weeks prior to the seminar, I sent these readings as PDFs to my hosts, who circulated them among the participants. I was advised to install a VPN connection on my laptop computer prior to leaving for China, and this proved useful in circumventing China’s censorship of the Internet. Like many U.S. scholars, I teach with the Internet and take for granted its accessibility in the classroom, but I couldn’t be confident about its availability during the seminar. I therefore brought media in portable formats: mp3 audio files of presidential recordings and Vietnam War-era music; a DVD copy of the film The Atomic Cafe (1982); an original copy of Life magazine;
and numerous images. I prepared fifteen lectures plus ten discussions. I confirmed ahead of time that I would be able to use PowerPoint and made sure to bring plug adapters. Once I arrived, my graduate student hosts were very accommodating in finding me anything I needed to facilitate my presentations. They sensed my modest technical abilities and noted the obsolescence of my personal iPhone and university-issued laptop. Our group of about forty met in a seminar room in which most students could fit around a large seminar table, while others sat on chairs lining the walls. The room was equipped with a large screen at one end to which I could connect my laptop, as well as with microphones, which students could use to ask questions, and which were essential to preserving my voice.
Many of my U.S. colleagues, some in my home department, have experience teaching history in China. This transpacific exchange speaks to China’s growing presence in global education, including in the humanities, but it raises questions about academic freedom not necessarily present in scientific fields. More than one veteran of teaching in China also cautioned me that students’ English skills could be uneven, and that Chinese graduate students might be reticent. With respect to English, our group had a range of abilities: some were fluent and easily tackled the readings I had assigned; others were less capable in English, but even among this group
several made a determined effort to participate and came prepared with questions that they had carefully composed ahead of time. PowerPoints helped students to follow along with lectures. I also distributed bibliographies and other printed materials. Above all, I was delighted that many students asked questions. On the first day, I gave introductory remarks and showed them where I was from on a map. I also encouraged them to pose questions, offer alternative perspectives, and tell me about research in China, especially their own. I stressed the importance of exchanging ideas and passed out some small gifts (they burst into applause!). The students took my requests to heart. Not only did they ask questions as part of each session, but on more than one occasion I scrapped the planned lecture in order to respond to their interests. I received numerous questions about U.S. political history and requests to define terms such as “liberal,” “conservative,” and “neoconservative.” Students were especially interested in the politics of anti-communism. With primary sources, I tried to show how anti-communism could be adapted to serve antithetical political agendas, from civil rights activists to “Dixiecrat” defenders of Jim Crow. Students were fascinated by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s aide Roy Cohn and Cohn’s later role as fixer for New York real estate developer Donald Trump. While seminar participants
This transpacific exchange speaks to China’s growing presence in global education, including in the humanities, but it raises questions about academic freedom not necessarily
present in scientific fields.
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were generally familiar with U.S. foreign policy, they wanted to learn about American society.
Prior to traveling to China, I had concerns about academic freedom. This issue was particularly sensitive given the subject matter of the Cold War. As an invited foreign scholar my speech was not restricted. Students, however, were constrained in what they could say on certain topics. Although there were some faculty present as members of the seminar, I did not feel that they controlled the course of discussions. On the first morning, the Communist party secretary for the university gave a speech to the seminar in Chinese. She then left. All of my lectures were filmed. The camera stayed mostly on me, although some students were filmed asking questions. During our discussion about the end of the Cold War, one student asked how U.S. scholars teach about the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. I replied and then turned the question around, asking how those events were discussed among Chinese historians. Off-camera, the student silently gestured to indicate that critical discussion of this topic was off-limits. The conversation moved on, although people later privately expressed a range of opinions.
Because of our focus on U.S. foreign policy, and my critical approach to it, there were differences of opinion, but no direct conflict. While I modeled the scholarly criticism of my own government permitted in the U.S., many of our discussions addressed the deleterious consequences of American Cold War policies in Asia. Overall, our exchanges were relaxed and friendly, with many light moments, such as when we chuckled at photos of Richard Nixon fumbling with chopsticks during his trip to China in 1972. At the end of the week, every seminar participant received a certificate of completion bearing my
signature, and I was photographed handing the certificate to each person. Many expressed their thanks, and I encouraged them to keep in touch.
The informal chats I had with students and faculty were as enjoyable as the seminar discussions. In talking with faculty, I learned that certain concerns among history professors are universal, such as encouraging students toward finishing their dissertations and balancing administrative duties with research. In the evenings, I dined at Xi’an’s excellent restaurants with small groups of faculty and graduate students. At the beginning and end of my week at Shaanxi Normal University, faculty and administrators held a dinner in my honor with many toasts. Faculty accepted some gifts I brought for them, and I left a signed copy of my recent book with Professor Bai Jiancai, whose research is related to mine. In addition to the principal coordinators of my visit, Professor Bai, Liang Hongguang, and Guo Ruizhi, I wish to thank Bai Jiaoping, Chang Xia, and Jin Xiaoyong for their warm welcome and for taking time to show me around.
In many of our exchanges, students and faculty wanted me to appreciate the social and geographic diversity of China and its rapid economic growth. I also had many conversations about U.S. society and politics. My hosts were especially eager to understand the implications of Trump’s election, and to talk about U.S.-China relations. During the weekends that bookended the seminar, I visited major attractions in Xi’an, including the Terracotta Warriors, the Drum and Bell Towers, the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda, and the Muslim market street and mosque. At the end of the week, I traveled via high-speed train to Beijing, where I met up with my wife Sharon. We spent a week visiting tourist sites, an educational experience which my honorarium
helped to support. I’m glad that Xi’an was my first experience of China, because it gave me an appreciation for non-Han Chinese populations and a sense of the politics surrounding the government’s “nationalities” policy through which it seeks to manage ethnic and religious differences.
The informal discussions enhanced the seminar experience and made the China Residency program highly educational and enriching for me. Discussions about contemporary China and the United States often had direct tie-ins to historical material. Examining how American and Chinese propaganda during the Cold War each criticized the other’s treatment of minorities flowed into conversations about the status of Muslims, Tibetans, and African Americans today. The “One Belt, One Road” policy of today’s China also had important antecedents in China’s Cold War assistance of developing, postcolonial countries. I made new friends and colleagues and became acquainted with historical scholarship and teaching in China. Graduate students and faculty gave me a window into the kinds of historical questions that Chinese scholars from my field are asking and the types of primary sources they consult. I observed the effects of the country’s dramatic growth, and came away with the strong desire to return. I am grateful to the OAH, AHRAC, and the Ford Foundation for this valuable opportunity. Moreover, thanks to a generous grant from the Ford Foundation, the OAH will continue the teaching seminar in the People’s Republic of China, sponsored by AHRAC through 2019. As part of this program, three Chinese students and scholars of American history attend the OAH Annual Meeting, and then do research at various host institutions across the United States. TAH
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Twitter and the Historical Profession
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E John Fea
In June 2017, President Donald J. Trump decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, a coalition of nations committed to mitigating global warming. Trump’s decision was the impetus for a stimulating Twitter exchange between Joyce E. Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Chair of Early American History at Harvard University, and Ted Cruz, the junior United States Senator from Texas. Chaplin opposed Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreements. On June 1, 2017 she tweeted, “The USA, created by int’l community in Treaty of Paris in 1783, betrays int’l community by withdrawing from #parisclimateagreement today.”
Cruz, who was horrified by the idea that the “international community” created the United States, responded to Chaplin with a passion- filled tweet of his own: “Just sad. Tenured chair at Harvard, doesn’t seem to know how USA was created. Not a treaty. Declaration+Revolutionary War+Constitution=USA.” He followed this with another tweet: “Lefty academics @ my alma mater think USA was ‘created by int’l community.’ No--USA created by force, the blood of patriots & We the People.”
Academic historians—the so-called “#twitterstorians”—rushed to their phones and keyboards to defend Chaplin. Cruz supporters and other political conservatives also took to Twitter to wage another battle in their culture war against the so-called liberal elites. We should not make too much of the Chaplin-Cruz Twitter exchange, but the quick response to this debate from American historians shed light on the role that Twitter now plays in the practice of academic history and our public discourse on matters related to the nation’s past. Every major historical organization in the country is present on Twitter. History conference-goers, especially those who attend larger gatherings such as the
annual meetings of the American Historical Association or the Organization of American Historians, use Twitter to bring order to the seemingly endless array of panels and sessions. They use hashtags such as #aha18 or #oah17 to report on content for fellow historians who are unable to be physically present. Conference programs often include suggested hashtags and notes on responsible tweeting.
Other historians use Twitter to provide historical context to current events. Twitter historians rose to the occasion during the 2016 presidential campaign, offering thoughts on everything from “America First” and Operation Wetback to “law and order” and “Make America Great Again.” During the presidential debates—both in the primaries and general election—historians used Twitter to correct factual errors and comment on how a candidate’s reference to the past might explain their policy commitments in the present. And it was all done in real time.
The history Twittersphere is alive and well. At a time when history departments at colleges and universities around the country are struggling to enroll undergraduates in their classes and attract new majors, history on Twitter is booming. Academic historians have large followings on this social media platform. Princeton University’s Kevin M. Kruse (73,600 followers), Yale University’s Joanne B. Freeman (20,100 followers), Baylor University’s Thomas S. Kidd (10,400 followers) and Boston College’s Heather Cox Richardson (9,250 followers), have made Twitter a vital part of their professional profiles. Popular historians such as Michael Beschloss, Simon Schama, and Niall Ferguson all have over one hundred thousand followers.
So why should historians consider joining Twitter? Here are four good reasons:
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Networking Opportunities
The traditional social hierarchies that we normally associate with the academic profession are less important on Twitter. Senior scholars who employ this platform in their professional lives (as opposed to just having a vanity account that they never use) realize that their tweets will be discussed, retweeted, and analyzed. There is thus an assumption that they are willing to enter the fray—to engage in intellectual tussles with all kinds of people. It is quite common to see exchanges and “conversations” on Twitter in which senior historians, junior faculty members, graduate students, undergraduates, and history buffs all participate. Twitter also has a direct messaging feature in which the conversation can be moved to a private space. I have found that many academic historians are more open to responding to queries via direct message than they are to an e-mail.
Because Twitter fosters this kind of democratic conversation, it provides a wonderful venue for networking. Twitter is a great place to find participants for conference panels or build professional relationships that might result in deeper and richer (beyond 280 characters) conversations and collaborations in the future, including face-to-face meetings at conferences. Twitter is one of many ways for younger historians to advance their careers. Of course, scholars at all levels should take the kind of tweets that they publish
seriously. People are watching. Academic reputations are on the line. One would be foolish to believe that history department committees are not checking Twitter as part of their searches for new colleagues.
Twitter’s use of hashtags allows one to network in a more intimate subfield, specialty, or area of interest. As a historian who studies early America and American religion, I regularly check the following hashtags: #vastearlyAmerica (early American history), #amrev (American Revolution), and #amrel (American religious history). Since I teach future high school history teachers, I occasionally see what people are tweeting at #sschat (social studies teachers) and #historyteacher. And my interest in how history impacts our daily lives as American citizens leads me to hashtags like #whystudyhistory, #everythinghasahistory, #historycomm (history communicators), and #publichistory.
Crowdsourcing Opportunities
I was recently finishing a book on religion and politics and realized that I wanted to say a bit more about what theologians—past and present—had written about the relationship between Christianity and political power. My deadline was fast approaching, and I needed a few standard books on the subject that I could read quickly, incorporate into my manuscript, and use to strengthen a few footnotes. Since my reading in this area was limited,
I turned to Twitter. Within a few hours I had a reading list of over two dozen very good books and articles on the subject. Since I had worked hard at building a large twitter community (14,200 followers) that included many scholars with similar interests as mine, I rarely had to think twice about the quality of the material that my followers suggested. Twitterstorians tend to be very generous people when it comes to crowdsourcing. Some want to genuinely help. Others want to show off their knowledge of the literature in this or that subfield. But whatever the motivation, scholars on Twitter can be an immense help when one is stuck on a research or writing project. Those watching this kind of crowdsourcing exchange unfold on Twitter might share similar interests and thus appreciate the opportunity to strengthen their own bibliographies on the given topic. Of course, it is easy to take advantage of such generosity. Twitterstorians tend to be keenly aware of followers and other tweeters who use this kind of crowdsourcing to cut corners in their work.
Platform Building
Not all of us are award-winning history doyens who have publishers waiting in line for our next book. Few of us have e-mail boxes filled with speaking invitations. Most of us don’t have Ivy League degrees or built-in professional networks that we inherited from our academic advisers. Nevertheless, as historians we take
The traditional social hierarchies that we normally associate with the academic profession are less important on Twitter.
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pride in our work and think that we have something useful to contribute to the historical profession or the public. Therefore, online platforms are essential. In the social media world, “followers”—whether they be on Twitter, Facebook, or some other site—are key to successful platform building. Twitter allows historians to express their views, share their work, and attract a community of people who find what we have to say to be useful and want to read more. In today’s publishing world, trade presses and a growing number of university presses will consider a historian’s online platform before offering a book contract. Most presses have limited budgets for advertising, so they expect authors and potential authors to promote their work on their social media platforms.
In developing a platform, Twitter works best when combined with other forms of social media. In 2008, when my first historical monograph appeared at the University of Pennsylvania Press, someone in the press’s public relations department encouraged me to create a website and blog devoted to the book. I took this advice to heart and started The Way of Improvement Leads Home (www.thewayofimprovement.com), a blog that has since expanded beyond the original book project to include a variety of musings on American history, politics, religion, and academic life. The blog gets several thousand readers a day, many of whom discover it through my Twitter
account. Every post that I write at the blog is automatically linked to Twitter via a tool provided by WordPress, the platform that hosts The Way of Improvement Leads Home. My blog is the foundation of my social media platform, but most of the traffic to the site now comes through Twitter. I have published five subsequent books since 2008, and my online platform, which has expanded to include public speaking and a podcast, has been an important part of my conversations with all five of the acquisitions editors with whom I have worked.
Public Engagement
Not all academic historians will be interested in Twitter and other social media platforms, but for those of us who want to reach a non-academic audience with our work, it is indispensable. I have come to view my efforts on Twitter (and my blogging) as a form of public history. Historians who use Twitter as part of their professional profile often see themselves as online curators. Many general Twitter users “follow” historians with academic credentials because they view us as professionals—people who they can trust. Twitter offers historians opportunities to challenge our followers to think historically about the world by sharing links to reputable websites, introducing and interpreting primary sources, suggesting pertinent books, and retweeting and commenting on news articles. Sometimes historians
will unleash a series of consecutive history-related tweets in response to a current event. Many of these so-called “threads” are shared widely and offer a glimpse, albeit a limited one, of a historical mind in action.
Every historian who practices their craft on Twitter will be quick to say that a social media platform is no replacement for the kind of long-form writing that allows us to make nuanced arguments about the past. Traditional historians who doubt the usefulness of social media have nothing to fear. The practice of history is not going to be reduced to 280-word sound bites anytime in the future. But Twitter has been a boon to historians who want to build their professional profile, connect with like-minded scholars, and bring responsible history to the Internet. In this sense, it is one of many tools in the historian’s toolbox. TAH
Twitter has been a boon to historians who want to build their professional profile, connect with like-minded scholars, and
bring responsible history to the Internet.
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We often hear the phrase, “there is no such thing as a natural disaster.” What does that mean? How does that idea shape the way you’ve watched the recent storms and floods?
» ANDY HOROWITZ
The idea, as I construe it, is that disasters have histories. Who is in harm’s way, and the sort of harm they are in the way of, are products of human decisions and social arrangements.
To many observers, disasters can seem like they erupt out of nowhere, in a catastrophic instant, but as historians, it’s our job to place them in time and space. So when I approach events like the recent storms, I start by asking: who was in danger? When did they arrive there? Why? Almost by definition, seeing disasters as products of history makes them seem less random and less inevitable.
That’s certainly been the case for my own research on Katrina. The hurricane made landfall in 2005, but I begin my book in 1915, because that’s when people started building the houses that ultimately flooded nine decades later. Placing the storm in historical context enables me to show how federal housing policies encouraged people to move to risky places, and how the oil industry’s development in coastal wetlands made those places even more vulnerable. It also enables me to narrate the ideologies that shaped how people experienced and saw Katrina.
Photo by U.S. Coast Guard, Petty Officer 2nd Class Kyle Niemi. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is in
the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 101 and § 105).
A category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of up to 130 mph when it made landfall, Hurricane Harvey dumped over fifty inches of rain on Houston, breaking Texas’ record for annual rainfall in less than a week. Harvey’s unprecedented size forced television news to create new color categories to visually represent the scale of the storm. And reports suggest it could have the greatest economic impact of any storm in American history.1 Just one year earlier, southern Louisiana experienced devastating flooding from an unnamed storm, which the Red Cross called the “worst natural disaster” since Superstorm Sandy.2
These sorts of devastating, weather-related disasters have wide-ranging effects. History, it is clear, shapes both the impact of and response to disasters. Chad Parker sat down with Andy Horowitz and Liz Skilton,
scholars whose work has focused on disasters, to talk about how history shapes both the impact of and response to disasters, and how they communicate the role of history in moments like these.
“DISASTERS HAVE HISTORIES” TEaching and REsearching American Disasters
Chad H. Parker, Andy Horowitz, and
Liz Skilton
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» LIZ SKILTON
After Hurricane Maria, President Trump asserted that the residents of Puerto Rico had not experienced “a real catastrophe like Katrina.” These comments quickly sparked a national debate over how to define a “real catastrophe,” notably as we wrestled to contextualize a different type of disaster, the Las Vegas Shooting, which had occurred two days before Trump’s comments on Puerto Rico. The two disasters—a hurricane and shooting—brought up questions related to the juxtaposition of different types of disasters and the memory of past experiences with disasters, particularly the one that has fundamentally shaped the twenty-first-century understanding of disaster (Hurricane Katrina). When I teach my American Disasters course, I start by telling my students that historically, we talk about what constitutes a disaster based on three fundamental characteristics. First, we decide whether the disaster was sizable in terms of physical size and impact radius, economic impact in the long and short-term, and loss of human life. Second, we ask whether the disaster was of local, national, or international concern (and whether it meets federal aid standards, such as the FEMA/Stafford Act relief). And third, we determine whether the disaster was considered man-made or “natural.” This last characteristic—man- made or natural—is often the most confusing one for students to grasp once we start to unpack the varieties of meaning. Any disaster could be both man-made and natural, particularly today when anthropogenic influence permeates most situations.
» HOROWITZ
On that last point, given what we know about how burning fossil fuels increases the frequency and severity of storms, we ought to teach modern hurricanes, in part, as events in the history of the industrial revolution.
How does a historical understanding of the environment, nature, policy, politics, race, gender, class, and ideology shape our reaction to events like Hurricane Harvey? What do you, as scholars and teachers of disaster history, do in the classroom and the community to help students and the public understand these intersections historically?
» SKILTON
The phrase “natural disaster” has grown in public use over the past century. In my course, I explain how that growth reflects a change in the impression of what constitutes a disaster. One of the tools I use to do this is Google Ngram, which tracks the use of terms in millions of books over time. When we look for “natural disaster” in Google Ngram, we see that it emerges in English-text books around the 1920s and rises in popularity after the 1970s. Part of this has to do with the enactment of federal legislation defining a disaster, and the other part is directly related to cultural changes in the understanding of the environment and human role within it. By the time we get to the 2000s, Americans use the phrase “natural disaster” with ease, but have continued to debate its meaning even more following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Katrina was neither entirely “natural” nor “man- made,” and the complexity of the storm, the recovery, and its continued impact has caused us to reevaluate defining a disaster as one or the other.
Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria confirm this change in the common understanding of disaster. Media coverage for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma frequently focused on the impact of the anthropogenic decisions in the city of Houston that led to conditions of extreme flooding, or climate and coastal change in Miami. Meanwhile, discussion of Hurricane Maria’s effect on Puerto Rico and federal response to it has reviewed the history of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean. As historians, I believe this shift in how
” To many observers, disasters can seem like they erupt out of
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job to place them in time and space.
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we understand disaster has affected how we viewed disasters this year. Just the fact that we are connecting disasters to larger anthropogenic influence during a disaster is significant in observing how we consider our role in the natural world. The real testament to impact, however, will be whether it will result in policy revision to disaster legislation or mitigation efforts.
» HOROWITZ
It’s our job as historians to help people understand how change happens. I start my disasters class with the idea that “there’s no such thing as a natural disaster,” not because it’s foundational to the field of disaster studies, but because it’s foundational to the study of the history of anything: historians assume that change doesn’t just happen, but is made.
History is the antidote to inevitability. If I started my Katrina book at the instant the levees broke, there would be no place in the story to see how things might have been different. But by giving Katrina a history, I can highlight the decisions that put people in danger. Those contingencies reveal how things could have been different in the past. They offer a map to making change in the future. It can be terrifying to recognize
how the moments that we refer to as disasters are not cosmic bad luck but rather are products of human history. But it can also be empowering to know that even though the etymology of the word “disaster” refers to stars out of alignment, “The fault…is not in our stars,” as Shakespeare wrote, “But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Liz, you’ve been engaged in an oral history project related to the 2016 floods in southern Louisiana. What have you and your students begun to learn about the interactions between the past and the present?
» SKILTON
This past summer, I worked with a team of undergraduate and graduate students to collect oral history interviews on memories of recent disasters through a series of pop-up events called “History Harvests” in the Acadiana region of Louisiana. The project started because of my desire to measure community response to two different, but back-to- back disasters in the region—the 2015 Grand 16
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People sort through debris on Dominica after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in September 2017. Historians need to contextualize contemporary natural disasters to show how race, class, gender, colonialism, and imperialism play a part in a disaster’s aftermath.
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Theater shooting incident and the 2016 Acadiana floods—and has since expanded.
As we did the “Harvests,” my students were surprised, first of all, by how much people’s perception of the significance of a disaster changes with each subsequent disaster.
We’ve also found that disaster networks (and the perception of who participates in them) are evolving rapidly with social media influence. This includes the understanding of who should provide aid to a community affected by a disaster, what assistance is expected, and how quickly this aid should be available. It has inspired the creation of community volunteer groups (like the “Cajun Navy”) using social media as their primary communication platform to assist in official federal, state, and local efforts. These community efforts are largely based on past experiences with other disasters that are critical to understanding these new forms of response.
When collecting the interviews, my students were amazed at the number of disasters people remembered and the detail to which their memories form perceptions of current disasters. They all agree that while a current disaster might be a central focus of the moment, past disasters play a significant role in affecting how we perceive what is taking place, and thus they are vital to understanding response. Collecting this material now will help us study disasters in the future.
Andy, you wrote several op-eds while the Harvey and Irma disasters were unfolding to discuss elements of the 1900 Galveston hurricane and Hurricane Katrina. Why? What role do newspaper opinion pages play in teaching disaster history?
» HOROWITZ
It’s our civic responsibility as scholars, and an extension of our role as teachers, to share what we know when it might be of use.
There were two points I thought I could most usefully make around the hurricanes this fall. The first is that though fears of looting and social disorder are common during floods—often leading to violence, as people seek to protect themselves from the marauding gangs they believe are about to beat down the door— actual looting is rare. I hoped reminding people of
this fact might calm anxieties a bit and help prevent misguided, fear-inducing press coverage.
The second point I tried to make based on my research was that so much of what we often think of as the disaster is, in fact, a product of policy decisions made afterwards. Who returned to New Orleans after Katrina, for example, cannot be explained by the flood but rather by the prerogatives of recovery programs. In many ways, the defining parts of the events we will come to know as Harvey, Irma, or Maria will occur long after the storm clouds clear. So if you care about the fate of your fellow citizens, your work is far from done just because the floodwater is gone.
More broadly, I wanted to argue that we too often gather the challenges posed by rising seas, hurricanes, and the like under the banner of “climate change,” when they are not primarily climatological. The challenges are political and moral. They resemble other problems we’ve faced as a society in the past, and our successes or failures will not be measured in terms of degrees or inches, but in terms of legitimacy and justice.
What about living in southern Louisiana helps situate your own approach to teaching about these subjects?
» HOROWITZ
Well, the fact that parts of the Tulane University campus flooded during Katrina certainly personalizes the “so what” question for my students!
In some ways, that means my charge is to help my students move back and forth between the specific and the general. Katrina happened on our campus and in our city, but also in the South, in America, and in the world. Thinking about how to narrate a story or make an argument at those different scales can be a productive challenge.
» SKILTON
When I moved to New Orleans in 2007 to study Katrina, I became part of a generation who migrated to the city post-storm. I documented and participated in the rebirth of the city and a decade later still call it home, even though I now teach at a state university three hours away. Post-Katrina New Orleans fundamentally shaped my scholarship and perspective on the intersection of the environment, policy, politics,
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race, class, gender, and ideology. I now try to expose my students to this by taking them on field excursions to sites of contested environmental change such as New Orleans, the industrial corridor or “Cancer Alley,” and even the wetlands in kayaks to see oil spill effects. I have tried to pass experiences like this on to my students to encourage them to get out into the field and be on the front lines of public discourse.
Do we run a risk of historicizing disasters too quickly? What can we learn from recent events like Hurricane Harvey, when the event is ongoing and our understandings of it are incomplete?
» SKILTON
Every disaster can be compared to one of the past. Understanding how it fits within the context of a region, culture, and history is vital to predicting how a current disaster will impact the population and surrounding environment. The real risk with historicizing disaster is the attempt to claim every disaster as “the worse we have ever seen,” without contextualizing what that means. This language provides no perspective except to warn of impending doom, and even then, creates impressions of a disaster that mislead response, relief efforts, and perceptions of impact, mainly when a subsequent disaster follows.
» HOROWITZ
History is always ongoing and our understanding is always incomplete. Calls not to historicize or politicize an event are efforts to evade discussions about culpability and responsibility.
I agree that calling each disaster the “worst ever” doesn’t add much to our civic dialogue. Often, the best thing a historian can do is just the opposite: to find precedents that can help us make sense of our current predicaments. The problems we face are not new—you don’t have to get very far in the book of Genesis until you reach the history of a flood, after all. There is a vast warehouse of human experience with disaster, full of successes, failures, and lessons yet to be learned, and historians hold the key. TAH
ENDNOTES
1. Robinson Meyer, “Hurricane Harvey Is the Rainiest Atlantic Hurricane Ever Measured,” Atlantic, Aug. 29, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-is-the-rainiest-atlantic-hurricane-ever- measured/538407/; Doyle Rice, “Harvey to be costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, estimated cost of $190 billion,” USA Today, Aug. 30, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/08/30/harvey-costliest-natural-disaster-u-s- history-estimated-cost-160-billion/615708001/.
2. Emma Brown, Ashley Cusick, and Mark Berman, “Louisiana flooding is the country’s ‘worst natural disaster’ since Hurricane Sandy, Red Cross says,” Washington Post, Aug. 17, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ post-nation/wp/2016/08/17/louisiana-flood-victims-face-long-road-back-to-normal-i-lost-everything/?utm_term=. a22521045455.
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Sacramento Skyline
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Preparation for a conference can be the difference between an excellent experience and a frustrating one. The Organization of American Historians strives for each attendee to come away from the Annual Meeting satisfied, rejuvenated, and inspired. By offering the tools and information below, I hope to help you become comfortable in navigating the conference so you can focus your time onsite enjoying it.
LOCATIONS
The 2018 OAH Annual Meeting will take place at three venues in downtown Sacramento, California. The primary location is at the Sacramento Convention Center, where attendees will find registration, all sessions, and the exhibit hall. The Hyatt Regency will house most meal functions (such as breakfast, luncheons, and receptions); most workshops and committee and affiliate group meetings; and the evening
plenary. The Sheraton Grand Sacramento will host the LAWCHA committee meeting, luncheon, and reception.
ACCOMMODATIONS
There are two conference hotels available within the OAH room block, which is available until March 22, or until the block is filled, the Hyatt Regency Sacramento and the Sheraton Grand Sacramento. Both hotels are across the street from the Convention Center. The hotel nightly rates are $163 and $158 respectively. For information on reserving your room, either online or by phone, please visit ww.oah.org/ meetings-events/2018/accommodations/#reserve.
REGISTRATION
Pre-registration is available until April 1, 2018, at which time rates increase. The OAH offers several categories of registration for both members and non-members. Depending on your category, it may be cheaper to become a member and register at the member rate than to register using the non-member rate. To receive the member rate, be sure to complete your membership application or renewal prior to registering.
Attendees accompanied by a spouse or other guest who would not otherwise attend the Annual Meeting are welcome to register their guest using the guest registration option. This allows guests access to all events at a deeply discounted rate.
Attendees should also be aware of the new Institution Group Registration. If four or more individuals from one institution are attending the conference, they are eligible for a 15% discount per registration (the discount is applied to each person’s category). This is a great way to connect with your colleagues and encourage those who may be on the fence to attend while saving money.
Navigating the 2018 Annual Meeting: Sacramento, California, April 12–14, 2018
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S Hajni G. Selby, Director of Meetings
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Finally, educators who would like to bring three or more pre-candidacy students to the conference can contact the OAH for a special $35 student rates. To learn more about the various registration options and to view frequently asked questions, please go to: http://www.oah.org/ meetings-events/2018/registration/.
PLANNING YOUR SCHEDULE
There are multiple ways to map your conference schedule. The Annual Meeting Program lists all events in various formats. Begin by viewing the daily “Schedule-at-a-Glance” charts at the front of the program to get an overview of the events and session that interest you. Using the page numbers listed, you can find session descriptions or else peruse the entire program from beginning to end. The Annual Meeting Program is organized categorically: highlights, meals, workshops, tours, and sessions.
Alternatively, you may use our new online Theme Visualizer (oah. org/OAH18_themes) to discover a new and perhaps unexpected path through the conference. The Visualizer allows you to select a theme and view all the sessions and papers that fall into that category or you can select a session to identify the theme and see all related sessions.
The mobile app, which becomes available in late March, is a great tool to not only explore the conference but also set your schedule. It allows you to mark all the events you would like to attend so you can easily manage
your time and find your locations. Be sure to attend the new Friday evening OAH Awards celebration, which now occurs separately from the Saturday Business Meeting!
FOOD FUNCTIONS & NETWORKING
The OAH offers attendees several food functions and networking events daily—many of which are free and open to all attendees. On Thursday all attendees are invited to the Opening Night Reception in the Exhibit Hall. This is a great place to meet with exhibitors and colleagues while grabbing a light snack and a free drink! Also on Thursday, and continuing for the duration of the conference, the OAH is organizing dine-arounds—an opportunity to go to dinner with fellow attendees. The dine-arounds offer a prix fixe (set price) menu that you pay for during the registration process. The big reception bonanza is Friday, with receptions open to attendees beginning at 4:00 pm with the Pre-Award Reception, followed by a Publishers Mix and Mingle at 5:45 pm, and then various receptions for OAH committees and affiliates representing many different areas of interest. Some of these groups also offer keynote luncheons, which you can sign up for during the registration process. Finally, we invite everyone to attend the President’s Closing Reception on Saturday evening. This reception honors OAH President Ed Ayers and allows you the opportunity
to make final connections and farewells within your community.
EXHIBIT HALL
The Exhibit Hall is where you will find valuable resources, contacts, and events. Most publishers bring their acquisitions editors to the conference to meet with you. We encourage you to take time out of your day to walk the exhibits, engage with exhibitors, learn about new resources, and, of course, purchase books! Most publishers will offer deep discounts on their books, so we recommend you leave space in your suitcase or, perhaps, even bring an extra bag!
For those interested in ice-breaker conversations with publishers, check out The Hub (http://www.oah. org/meetings-events/2018/hub/). Participating Hub publishers are specifically interested in meeting with attendees at the Annual Meeting and include SUNY Press, Yale University Press, University of Missouri Press, and Beacon Press.
Aside from exhibitors, the Hall also offers various lounge areas to meet with colleagues and friends as well as the Thursday Plenary Theater, the Doing History Workshop Theater (which offers nine free in-depth workshops to engage broader audiences with high-quality scholarship), Chat Room and museum displays.
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Annual Meeting Roundup: Preview of “Crafting Your Book Proposal and Attracting a Publisher”
Editorial note: In preparation for the Annual Meeting in April, the OAH is offering a series of session previews— “Annual Meeting Roundups”—where randomly selected presenters provide a sneak peek for their sessions. These posts will appear on the new OAH Insights page (see News of the Organization on page 50 for more information) or Process (http://www.processhistory.org).
Dr. Melody Herr has written a book on this topic—Writing and Publishing Your Book: A Guide for Experts in Every Field (2017)—and has adapted the introduction for this preview of her two professional development workshops at the 2018 Annual Meeting where she will provide important tips and insights on how to write and submit a successful book proposal.
Experts like you are the reason I started reading serious books. As a teenager, I discovered the thrill of engaging, on the page, with experts who introduced me to Catherine the Great, explained chimpanzee behavior, and recounted the discovery of the double helix.
Experts like you are the reason I went to graduate school. As a college student, I relished conversations with Frank Bremer, the biographer of John Winthrop, and Steve Centola, the Arthur Miller scholar. When historian John Hope Franklin and paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey gave guest lectures, I arrived at the auditorium before the doors opened. Inspired by these face-to-face encounters, I applied to graduate school with the intention of becoming an expert and writing important books myself.
Experts like you are the reason I chose this career path. By the time I earned a Ph.D., I knew I couldn’t write all the books that I believe really must be written. But, as an acquisitions editor, I could assist other experts. For more than 16 years, I worked for a number of university presses, including Johns Hopkins and the University of Michigan. During that time, I published over 250 books in collaboration with authors in fields ranging from business history and U.S. history to law, political science, and international relations. Building on this experience, I moved into scholarly communications, an emerging profession which encompasses the economic, ethical, legal, and functional aspects of today’s diverse, complex systems for disseminating research and scholarship. In this role, I help authors navigate these systems and make informed choices.
You’ve invested years of study, research, and lived experience in becoming an expert. You know your topic, inside and out. However, writing and publishing a book requires an additional layer of expertise—the kind of expertise I can provide. I’d like to volunteer as your personal writing coach, and so you are the reason I wrote Writing and Publishing Your Book (2017). In this guide, I show you how to construct a table of contents, prepare a proposal, identify a publisher, manage peer review, negotiate a contract, draft your manuscript, and market your book. By following a few practical, step-by-step instructions, you will liberate your creativity and keep moving forward, efficiently and confidently.
You say you don’t have time to read a book because you’re completely focused writing your own? Great! But please come to the workshop at OAH 2018—I’m offering it twice, once on Friday from 10 am until 11:30 am and again on Saturday at the same time—and let me introduce you to tried-and-true, time-saving strategies for crafting a book proposal that will appeal to publishers. I look forward to meeting you in Sacramento. In the meantime, keep writing!
Melody Herr is a seasoned publishing professional who has earned a reputation for a personal touch while working as an acquiring editor for university presses. An author herself, she has published nonfiction and historical fiction for young readers as well as scholarly work. Currently, she serves as Head of the Office of Scholarly Communications at the University of Arkansas where she continues to serve researchers and scholars in diverse fields.
Use #AM2644 to follow these sessions on Twitter.
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International Expertise and Its Discontents: What Disaster History Can Show about the Progressive Era
PHOTO BY W. G. MACLAUGHLAN, FROM THE W. G. MACLAUGHLAN PAPERS LOCATED IN THE NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES. PHOTO IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.
Jacob Remes
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For historians, disasters are double opportunities. They create paper: letters in which survivors narrate their ordeals, newspaper accounts, and bureaucratic files such as reports, appeals, and statistics. They occasion the creation of archives that record things that likely would have gone unrecorded otherwise. They are moments and create stories through which a historian can shape a broader narrative. But they also change history: they cause people to move; they are opportunities for beneficent or maleficent actors to reshape society; and they occasion contests for power. The history of disasters can illuminate themes in Progressive Era history even as disasters helped to create the Progressive Era itself. An international cadre of disaster experts—many of them mobilized by the American Red Cross—developed, traveling from disaster to disaster, bearing forms, methods, and ideology. At the same time, because the objects of these relief efforts fought back to demand aid on their own terms, disasters let us see how ordinary people sought both to take advantage of the help offered by the growing progressive state and to reject the power that reformers sought over them.
Thomas Wilson, or perhaps his parents, had migrated from the Canadian province of Nova Scotia to what many called “the Boston States” around the turn of the twentieth century, looking for work and opportunities that were
scarce in the underdeveloped Maritimes region of Canada.1 The Wilsons were not alone; in 1915, the Massachusetts commonwealth census found nearly eighty thousand people who had been born in Nova Scotia.2 By the end of 1917, Wilson worked in Boston’s building department. On December 6 of that year, an explosion tore through Nova Scotia’s capital city, Halifax. Sparked by the collision of a French munitions ship bound for World War I with a Norwegian civilian ship, the Halifax explosion killed just under two thousand people, maimed nine thousand, and rendered about twenty-five thousand homeless or jobless.
Nova Scotians in Massachusetts were desperate for information. They raised money, and some of them went back to help, but most of all they wanted confirmation that their family and friends in Halifax had survived. There were so many Nova Scotians in Boston that the city set up an ad hoc information bureau at city hall to conglomerate the inquiries and telegraph them to Halifax in an organized way. The building department seconded Thomas Wilson to run the bureau, and he spent his days getting inquiries, sending them to Halifax, and then relaying the answer. Four days before Christmas, he sent his own inquiry, asking his contact in Halifax for confirmation that his cousins were okay.
Halifax’s explosion was only one of the many disasters that beset the U.S. and Canada in
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the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Between 1870 and 1920, Chicago (1871), Boston (1872), Seattle (1889), St. John’s, Newfoundland (1892), the twin cities of Hull, Quebec, and Ottawa, Ontario (1900), Jacksonville, Florida (1901), Toronto (1904), Baltimore (1904), San Francisco (1906), Chelsea, Massachusetts (1908), and Salem, Massachusetts (1914), all suffered major conflagrations that destroyed large swaths of the city. Hurricanes killed thousands of people in the Florida Keys (1870), the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands (1893), rural Louisiana (1893), and Galveston, Texas (1900). This is to say nothing of the recurrent river floods (especially bad in 1913), epidemics, and workplace disasters like mine collapses and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. As generations of historians have written, one of the defining characteristics of the Progressive Era was a privileging of expertise and managerial knowledge. The tools of statistics, social science, and engineering seemed to give city planners, reformers, engineers, and social and natural scientists the ability to manage nature and society as managers directed a factory. Continued disasters seemed to be a constant reminder of the difficulty of this task. They also provided new opportunities for social workers, reformers, and technocrats to ply their new professions.
As Thomas Wilson’s story suggests, disasters were experienced both locally and transnationally. Even as the United States government erected more immigration controls and built a stronger state at the border,
many people’s lived experiences remained transnational. People, money, and ideas all crossed and recrossed national borders. News of the explosion reached the Massachusetts State House during a meeting of the Committee on Public Safety, which coordinated civilian efforts to support the war. Two committee members quickly organized a relief train. John Farwell Moors, a Yankee Democrat investor, and Abraham Captain Ratshesky, a Jewish Republican banker, had both been involved in managing disaster relief since the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.3 When they arrived in Halifax, they set about trying to get the local worthies who had established themselves as the “Halifax Relief Committee” in the near absence of municipal government to conform to what Moors and Ratshesky thought were the best practices of disaster relief. Later, on Moors’ recommendation, the American Red Cross dispatched Christian Lantz, the general secretary of the Salem YMCA, who had developed a filing system to keep track of aid recipients when his own city had suffered a conflagration. Other experts who arrived in Halifax included Thomas Adams, a British urban planner then working in Ottawa, who designed a garden suburb in part of the devastated area; C. C. Carstens, the secretary of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; R. C. Dexter, the general secretary of Montreal’s charity organization society; Thomas Darlington, the former New York City health commissioner; Katherine McMahan, the head of the Boston Dispensary’s social services department; Lucy Wright, a past member of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind; and John Howard Toynbee Falk, a British-born, Winnipeg-based charity worker whom the American Red Cross urged be appointed manager of social workers. The social workers whom Falk managed were also a transnational group, coming from across Canada and the United States. This group was largely assembled by the American Red Cross, which had begun a program to train, assemble,
The history of disasters can illuminate themes in Progressive Era
history even as disasters helped to create the Progressive Era itself.
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and circulate disaster experts about ten years before the explosion.
Meanwhile, it was not only the experts and social workers who crossed borders. So too did ordinary people like Thomas Wilson. As Moors and Ratshesky traveled to Halifax themselves, their colleagues on the Committee for Public Safety and its local committees around the state set about raising money.4 What became the Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee eventually raised about $700,000 in cash, plus in-kind donations. Much, if not most, of this money came from migrant Nova Scotians. Just as Nova Scotians in the Boston states sought information about their friends and relatives, they sent money and supplies. With that money came political power. People in Massachusetts who had donated wrote to relief authorities in Halifax demanding that their relatives be better taken care of; people in Halifax wrote to Massachusetts politicians demanding their share. Despite the legal border, people in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia created a transnational political community, and, through it, tried to establish political power over the relief doled out by experts.
Studying disaster helps us to see how well- meaning attempts to rescue and relieve people were often resisted by recipients—not because they did not want help but because they wanted to retain privacy and autonomy over their own lives. Before the Halifax explosion, Moors, Ratshesky, and Lantz had worked together in
Salem, Massachusetts, where in June 1914 a fire in a patent leather factory had spread across the city, rendering eighteen thousand people homeless, jobless, or both. In its aftermath, the National Guard erected two tent villages for homeless survivors.5 These camps became contested ground in which soldiers and officers sought to impose order and limit who got what aid, and residents used weapons of the weak to undermine that order. The authorities’ concerns were predictable: they cared about cleanliness, sanitation, and sobriety, they wanted to make sure that only the people they deemed eligible
received aid, and they feared that recipients would either leave or get used to the dole and not come back to work when factories were rebuilt.
In turn, the camps’ residents resisted the power and demands of the authorities. Encouraged to stay sober, they drank beer; ordered by soldiers to pick up trash, they refused
and were arrested; put in indistinguishable tents in straight lines, they pinned unofficial name tags to them and poached camp lumber to build personalized furniture. When a camp officer needed carpenters, they refused to work unless he paid the union wage. The same officer thought it inappropriate that women brought their babies to the milk station at night and ordered that babies be refused their feeding unless accompanied by a man; fathers refused to cooperate with this intrusion into their family arrangements and boycotted the relief milk. Survivors’ presence in the camps made their behavior and living conditions visible and vulnerable to authorities’ intrusion, but since authorities wanted recipients
[Disasters] also provided new opportunities for social workers, reformers, and technocrats to ply
their new professions.
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at the camps to make aid more efficient, survivors could demand accommodations in exchange for their continued presence. Relief authorities were also concerned with making sure that people received no more aid than that to which they were entitled. Ostensibly, this was to protect legitimate applicants, for whom there would be more left over if fakers were excluded. But despite entreaties from the police, elected officials, and priests, legitimate aid recipients seemed to refuse to turn in the fakes. Indeed, they shared information among themselves to maximize what they got. The fire’s victims wanted the money and material the government and private relief organizations offered them, but they fought to avoid giving up autonomy and privacy in return.
Progressives sought to tame nature, and disasters showed the difficulty of the project. But they also gave progressives an opportunity: to show how coordinated action could rescue people in need. For historians, disasters can show how those people in need were not simply passive recipients of aid. As legal scholar and historical sociologist Michele Landis Dauber has shown, disaster relief was a central component in the building of the American welfare state.6 Understanding how people in the Progressive Era built and resisted systems of authority and knowledge in the aftermath of disasters can help show what understandings, expectations, and contestations were built into the American welfare state. TAH
ENDNOTES
1. Thomas Wilson to R. P. Bell, Dec. 21, 1917, item 113.2i, series C, Correspondence, Halifax Relief Commission fonds, MG 36 (Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax, N.S.).
2. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics, Decennial Census, 1915 (1918), 290. For more on Maritimes migration to New England, see Alan A. Brookes, “Out-Migration from the Maritime Provinces, 1860–1900: Some Preliminary Considerations,” Acadiensis, 5 (Spring 1976), 26–55; Patricia A. Thornton, “The Problem of Out-Migration from Atlantic Canada, 1871–1921: A New Look,” Acadiensis, 15 (Autumn 1985), 3–34; Yves Otis and Bruno Ramirez, “Nouvelles perspectives sur le mouvement d’émigration des Maritimes vers les États-Unis, 1906–1930,” Acadiensis, 28 (Autumn 1998), 27–46; Betsy Beattie, Obligation and Opportunity: Single Maritime Women in Boston, 1870–1930 (2000); Bruno Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States, 1900–1930 (2001).
3. George Hinckley Lyman, The Story of the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety, February 10, 1917–November 21, 1918 (1919), 189–212. On John Farwell Moors, Abraham Captain Ratshesky, and other continental experts, see Jacob A.C. Remes, “‘Committed as Near Neighbors’: The Halifax Explosion and Border-Crossing People and Ideas,” American Review of Canadian Studies, 45 (March 2015), 26–43.
4. See, for example, a newspaper advertisement enclosed with Arthur N. Phippen to Henry B. Endicott, Dec. 12 1917, reel 12, Massachusetts Halifax Relief Committee correspondence and papers, Special Collections Division (Massachusetts State Library, Boston, Mass.).
5. Jacob A. C. Remes, Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (2016), 78–104.
6. Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (2013).
F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | T h e A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i a n 3 5
MASKED IMAGE FEATURES AN ENGRAVING BY VALENTINE GREEN, 1784. THIS WORK IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.
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MAKING SENSE OF DISASTERS IN EARLY AMERICA— AND TODAY by Matthew Mulcahy
Natural disasters of one kind or another have dominated the news for much of the past year. Hurricanes in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and other parts of the Caribbean, wildfires in California, and earthquakes in Mexico have served as jarring reminders of the power of natural forces to dismantle human infrastructure, disrupt human affairs, and claim human lives. They also remind us that natural disasters are never simply natural
events. Whether urban sprawl and the loss of wetlands in the Houston metropolitan region or the long-standing economic crisis in Puerto Rico
and its neo-colonial political status, recent events highlight that pre-existing conditions and human actions taken before (often long before) and after shape
the impact of disasters in fundamental ways. They reveal that factors such as race and class often play a significant role in how people experience disasters and how
they recover from them. And they raise new questions about human responsibility for some aspects of natural forces, specifically to what extent human-induced global warming
is intensifying the power and scope of “natural disasters.” Such questions and debates may appear particularly modern, but in some ways they are updated versions of a discourse that dates
to the beginning of European colonization efforts in North American and the Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. European colonists who migrated to the New World not only encountered a new climate, as Karen
Ordahl Kupperman illustrated in a classic essay published several decades ago, they also found themselves in a new world of disasters.1 Some disasters were entirely novel for colonists, such as the hurricanes that swept
across various colonies with a violence far surpassing that of the worst storms of Europe or West Africa. The Taíno word hurakan not only entered European vocabularies, but the storms became a defining symbol of all that was different and dangerous about the physical environment in colonies such as Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina. As one commentator stated, “an European can form no just idea of a West India hurricane.”2 Other disasters—earthquakes, floods, droughts, fires, blizzards, insect infestations—were not unfamiliar to colonists in
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a general sense, but often seemed far more powerful, intense, or frequent in the New World than in the Old. In both cases, and as is the case today, natural disasters played a significant role in the lives and fortunes of individuals and societies throughout the colonial era. News of calamities circulated widely, drawing attention (and at times aid) from people throughout the Atlantic world. Moreover, disasters often had major economic consequences for those who survived them and raised fundamental questions about the cause of such death and destruction.
Large-scale natural disasters in colonial British America came in a variety of forms. Then, as now, hurricanes routinely battered the Caribbean islands and southeastern mainland. The first English colonists on St. Christopher had barely begun to establish a settlement when a hurricane blew across the island in September 1624, wiping out their crude structures and initial tobacco crop. A “wonderfully horrid and destructive” hurricane hit lowcountry South Carolina in 1686, the first of many during the period of English colonization. The worst year for colonists was 1752, when back-to- back storms in September pummeled Charleston and the surrounding plantation zone. Alexander Hamilton’s account of a 1772 hurricane that lashed the Leeward Islands famously helped propel him to college in New York City. The most devastating hurricane in the early modern period struck Barbados and the Lesser Antilles on October 10, 1780. The storm still ranks as the deadliest in history, claiming the lives of between 20,000 and 30,000 individuals, many of them enslaved Africans, as well as numerous French and British sailors stationed aboard warships during the American Revolution. On Barbados at least 2,000 and as many as 5,000 slaves perished, and the storm caused over £1.3 million in damage to fields and plantations (the equivalent of roughly $230 million in today’s dollars). Great storms occasionally battered colonies farther north as well, but in the eyes of Cotton Mather and many other observers, they seemed less frequent and less intense than their counterparts in the Caribbean and southeastern lowcountry.3
Other calamities also took their toll. John Winthrop Jr. lost some 1,100 sheep and numerous cattle and horses during the “Great Snow” of 1717, a series of four storms in eleven days that dumped between three and five feet of snow across New England, with drifts in some places as high as sixteen feet. The snows significantly
“diminished” Winthrop’s estate along with many others in the region. Virginia planters in the James River basin suffered considerable losses when a “Great Fresh” (flood) cascaded down in May 1771. Dozens of people and hundreds of cattle drowned and thousands of hogsheads of tobacco washed away from storehouses along the river.4
Fires, often called “The Great Fire” in their respective colonies, repeatedly burned colonial towns, often resulting in significant losses. Charleston’s “Great Fire” in 1740 caused damage estimated at £200,000 to £250,000 sterling, while Boston’s “Great Fire” of 1760 burned some 349 buildings and destroyed property worth at least £53,000. Over 200 families lost their homes.5 Earthquakes, too, rattled colonies at various times, generating tremendous fear among many. One of the most memorable shook the eastern seaboard from New Hampshire to Maryland on November 18, 1755. Beyond its geographic scope, the timing of the earthquake, coming so close to the Great Lisbon earthquake on November 1 of that year, made it appear particularly significant in the eyes of many colonists.
Although less dramatic than other disasters, drought was another major calamity in the colonial period. The role of drought in the horrific suffering at Roanoke and Jamestown is well-known to historians, but perhaps less appreciated are the ongoing economic challenges posed by prolonged dry periods. A lack of rain in Jamaica, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands often withered sugarcane in the fields and by extension reduced sugar exports to Britain. In the Carolina lowcountry, S. Max Edelson has argued that “the dual threat of drought and flooding was the driving force behind technological innovation in planting,” as planters sought news ways to irrigate their fields from tidal rivers to reduce their vulnerability to unpredictable rains.6
While all colonists experienced hardships in the wake of major calamities, as is the case today, social and economic factors shaped the impact of disasters in significant ways. Wealthy merchants and planters frequently suffered great financial losses, but they often had access to credit—and in some cases, insurance— that aided efforts to recover and rebuild, while poorer colonists at times struggled to hold on to their property. Numerous small farmers in Barbados, for example, who lacked credit were forced to sell out to wealthier sugar planters following a hurricane in 1675. Those at the bottom of the colonial social hierarchy, enslaved
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Africans, felt the effects of large-scale disasters most severely, particularly when hurricanes, drought, and insect infestations damaged provision fields. Poorly fed in the best of times, enslaved Africans often faced famine conditions in the wake of disasters. Writing during an ongoing drought in June 1726, one overseer in Nevis reported “many Negroes and stock lost for want of provisions and water,” a bland accounting of what must have been terrible suffering. Prolonged drought, multiple hurricanes, and disruption to trade stemming from the American Revolution during the 1770s and 1780s combined to produce a “crisis in slave subsistence” and heightened mortality across much of the Caribbean.7
As colonists calculated their losses and struggled to recover from various calamities, they also looked to make sense of these events. Some sought explanations in the movement of the stars, and astrologers at times foretold (or attempted to foretell) when great calamities would strike. Likewise, Carib Indians in the Leeward Islands informed early colonists that rings around the moon indicated the number of days before the onset of a hurricane, and such knowledge remained in circulation for decades. Other observers sought to explain the
natural forces at work in disasters, drawing on classical knowledge and their own experience with particular events. Variations on Aristotle’s theory that earthquakes were linked to underground vapors and explosions, for example, appeared in publications and letters across the colonies from Massachusetts to Maryland to Jamaica. In other cases, the novelty or intensity of New World disasters pushed colonists and others to embrace a Baconian emphasis on observation and experience. “I have no intention to disparage the Authority of the Ancients, but I cannot . . . think that all Science is only to be sought for in the Urns of the Dead,” wrote one seventeenth-century commentator. Knowledge about hurricanes was “not to be had in Colleges or Books, but must be fetch’d fro[m] both Indies.” Such sentiments grew increasingly prominent over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.8
Most colonists, however, viewed natural disasters through the lens of providentialism. Hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, and other events were acts of God sent to punish sinful humans or warn of a worse fate if they did not reform their ways. No need to look for abstract natural forces at work in various
An eighteenth century woodcut illustrating the 1755 Cape Ann earthquake in what is now Massachusetts. Many colonists believed natural disasters to be acts of God and punishment for human sin.
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F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | T h e A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i a n 3 9
calamities, ministers and others routinely reminded their audiences. The cause of any disaster was simple: human sin. Thus a hurricane that blasted Virginia in 1667 was just retribution for colonists’ “evil way[s],” the 1752 twin hurricanes in South Carolina a mark of divine “displeasure against [colonists’] Transgressions,” and the plagues of caterpillars that descended across Virginia fields in 1728 and 1729 a “punishment” for “an offending people.” Regardless of the devastation, many writers emphasized, the damage could have been worse had an angry God not shown some compassion to his wayward followers.9
Because of the link between human sin and God’s wrath, the proper response to various calamities required victims to humble themselves before God. Local officials routinely called for colony-wide fast days in the aftermath of disasters. Colonists abstained from food, work, and all other recreations. Ministers offered special prayers and called upon listeners to recognize their responsibility for the present misfortune and to seek forgiveness. Fast days were generally affairs of the moment, called in response to specific events, but major disasters sometimes assumed a central place in colonists’ larger ritual calendar. June 7, for example, remained a public fast day in Jamaica for at least a century following the great earthquake of 1692. The practice of turning to a fast in the wake of disasters continued well into the nineteenth-century in the new United States as well. When cholera broke out in 1832, governments in eleven states declared a fast. Citing concerns about the separation of church and state, Andrew Jackson declined to proclaim a national fast in 1832, but Zachary Taylor recommended one when cholera returned to the United States in 1849.10
That colonists generally viewed disasters as providential events did not foreclose investigations into the natural forces at work in various calamities or questions about whether other factors contributed to the level of destruction. This was particularly true across the eighteenth century. Building upon earlier work, natural philosophers continued to investigate the
“secondary causes” (God being the “primary cause”) by which the winds swirled, the earth trembled, or prodigious rain fell (or did not fall). These writers did not deny that God could at any time directly send forth floods, fires, and earthquakes to warn and to punish, but they suggested that in most cases, God worked through established natural processes that were observable and understandable by human intellects. Such investigations often prompted stern rebukes from ministers who cautioned against too great an emphasis on natural as opposed to divine forces. Recognizing that natural forces may be at work in some earthquakes, Increase Mather nevertheless bluntly reminded his listeners in 1705, “There never happens an Earthquake but God speaks to men on the Earth by it: And they are very stupid, if they do not hear his Voice therein.”11
Interestingly, amid debates about primary and secondary causes, colonists also recognized that their own actions contributed to the level of destruction in various calamities. This was especially true in the wake of urban fires, in which cramped streets and mostly wooden structures provided ready fuel for flames to spread rapidly. Local officials frequently debated widening streets and requiring brick and stone as building materials as a means of reducing the threat of fires, although such measures often proved too expensive to be practical. A similar discourse followed hurricanes, which often caused greater damage to wooden structures than to those built of stone or brick and prompted debates about various reconstruction strategies. Colonists also critiqued actions that exacerbated the impact of a particular hazard. One Bostonian noted that a great number of the chimneys damaged during the 1755 Cape Ann earthquake were in parts of the town built on “low, loose Ground, made by Encroachments on the Harbour” (i.e. landfill). Likewise, while many were quick to see the devastating 1692 earthquake as just retribution against Port Royal’s population of pirates, prostitutes, and profaners, others with local knowledge of the town’s development offered a more nuanced assessment of the damage. They noted that much of the
Most colonists...viewed natural disasters through the lens of providentialism. Hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, and other events
were acts of God sent to punish sinful humans or warn of a worse fate if they did not reform their ways.
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town that had sunk into the harbor had been built on landfill created over the previous two decades. “On this sandy Neck of Land did People build great heavy brick houses, whose weight, on so sandy a Foundation, may be supposed to contribute much to their Downfall,” wrote one observer. Whatever the cause of the earthquake, some colonists accepted a degree of responsibility for the level of devastation.12
While these common understandings of disasters formed part of a shared culture of disasters across colonial British America, important regional differences also existed, giving rise to what might be termed regional disaster subcultures. In the Caribbean, the frequency and ferocity of various natural hazards altered colonists’ ideas about what constituted a major disaster. Because earthquakes routinely rattled several parts of the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, colonists there gradually viewed earthquakes, particularly those that caused minimal physical damage, as routine and expected, not as wondrous or unusual events. One telling example occurred when a recently arrived English minister named Emmanuel Heath sat down with John White, a local political leader, in a Port Royal tavern on June 7, 1692. When the ground began to shake, a terrified Heath turned to his companion and asked what was happening. “It is an earthquake, be not afraid, it will soon be over,” White replied, “very composedly.” White turned out to be a bit too premature in his assessment, as a few seconds later the shaking intensified and half of Port Royal collapsed in one the great disasters of the early modern Atlantic world. His initial response, however, reveals the extent to which Jamaicans had come to accept minor earthquakes as part of island’s physical environment.13
A similar attitude developed regarding hurricanes across the Greater Caribbean. The frequency of storms in the region, their seemingly limited geography, and that they struck in a well-defined season between July and the end of October, all seemed to undermine the idea that the storms came directly from the hand of God to punish sinners. Truly disastrous events—the Great Hurricane of 1780, for example—continued to hasten reflection of human sin and divine power in the Caribbean, but many “lesser” storms passed without any sustained moral reflection.
In contrast to the Caribbean, the mainland suffered relatively few earthquakes or hurricanes. In New England, the relative infrequency of these calamities,
combined with a more prominent religious culture, meant that when events did occur, many colonists viewed them as fraught with meaning even if the impact was relatively minor. The 1727 earthquake, for example, caused little serious physical damage, but local ministers published at least thirty sermons warning their listeners and readers to heed God’s message. And many did. The earthquake stimulated a religious revival in several towns in northeastern Massachusetts that, according to Erik Seeman, “brought unprecedented numbers of new members into many churches.” Similar attitudes marked responses to calamities in the Chesapeake as well throughout much of the eighteenth century. The relative infrequency of events like hurricanes and earthquakes there meant that, in Kathleen Murphy’s words, “providential interpretation[s], though under challenge, persisted alongside both a growing body of knowledge about the mechanical laws governing natural phenomena and an increasing emphasis on moral rationalism and order.”14
Thus, while providentialism provided the primary lens for interpreting calamities across British America, colonists also sought to understand natural process at work in such events and many recognized that human choices contributed to the damage and suffering. In one form or another, such responses suggested a perceived relationship between human action and natural calamities. Natural disasters were not, as one Maryland minister reminded his listeners in 1755, “Blunders of Chance, or the Blind Effect of unintelligent Fate.” Such attitudes would develop later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the rise of science and secular
By viewing disasters as caused by larger natural forces and thus beyond
the scope of human affairs and unrelated
to human choices, individuals and societies evaded any responsibility
for suffering.
F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | T h e A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i a n 4 1
thinking that viewed disasters as “acts of God” only in a rhetorical sense. By viewing disasters as caused by larger natural forces and thus beyond the scope of human affairs and unrelated to human choices, individuals and societies evaded any responsibility for suffering and engaged in what Ted Steinberg described as “one great exercise in moral hand washing.” The increased awareness in recent decades that natural disasters are
never simply natural events and that human activity is exacerbating the strength and impact of disasters represents yet another shift, one that, in a way, brings us full circle back to the early modern period. Our sins and offenses may be different, but in recognizing a link between natural disasters and human actions, we find ourselves in the company of many our colonial forbearers.15 TAH
ENDNOTES
1. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” American Historical Review, 87 (Dec. 1982), 1262–89.
2. Hector Macneill, Observations on the Treatment of Negroes, in the Island of Jamaica (1788), 39. 3. Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (2006). Dollars calculated
using Eric Nye’s converter, www.uwyo.edu/numimage/currency.htm. 4. Thomas Wickman, “The Great Snow of 1717: Settler Landscapes, Deep Snow Cover, and Winter’s Environmental
History,” Northeastern Naturalist, 24 (Special Issue 8, 2017), 81–114; Kathleen S. Murphy, “Virginia’s Great Fresh of 1771 and the Politics of Disaster Relief,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 123 (no. 4, 2015), 298–323.
5. Matthew Mulcahy, “The ‘Great Fire’ of 1740 and the Politics of Disaster Relief in Colonial Charleston,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 99 (April 1998), 135–53; G.B. Warden, Boston, 1689–1776 (1970), 149.
6. S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (2006), 104. 7. Edwin Gay, “Letters from a Sugar Plantation in Nevis, 1723–32,” Journal of Economic and Business History, 1
(Nov. 1928), 155–57; Richard B. Sheridan, “The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 33 (Oct. 1976), 615–41.
8. R. Bohun, A Discourse Concerning the Origine and Properties of Wind, with an Historicall Account of Hurricanes and other Tempestous Winds (1671), 2–5.
9. Strange Newes from Virginia, being a True Relation of a Great Tempest in Virginia (1667); Sophia Hume, An Epistle to the Inhabitants of South Carolina (1752), 6; Lt. Governor William Gooch to the Duke of Newcastle, July 24, 1730, in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series (1860), 221–22.
10. Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, 55–57; Kathleen S. Murphy, “Prodigies and Portents: Providentialism in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 97 (Jan. 2002), 415.
11. Increase Mather, A Discourse Concerning Earthquakes, Occasioned by the Earthquakes which were in New England (1706), 8.
12. Whitney Barlow Robles, “Atlantic Disaster: Boston Responds to the Cape Ann Earthquake of 1755,” New England Quarterly, 90 (March 2017), 7–35; Matthew Mulcahy, “The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica,” Early American Studies, 6 (Fall 2008), 391–421.
13. Rev. Emmanuel Heath, A Full Account of the Late Dreadful Earthquake at Port Royal in Jamaica; Written in Two Letters from the Minister of that Place (1692).
14. Erik R. Seeman, Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (1999), 150; Murphy, “Prodigies and Portents,” 399.
15. Thomas Case, quoted in Murphy, “Prodigies and Portents,” 407; Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disasters in America (2000), 201.
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Julia F. Irwin
The Origins of
U.S. Foreign Disaster
Assistance
In the twenty-first century, the U.S. govern-ment is among the world’s leading donors of bilateral disaster assistance.1 In an average year, the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA)—the branch of USAID charged with coordinating the government’s response to inter- national catastrophes—responds to some seventy disasters in more than fifty countries.2 The Depart- ment of Defense, the State Department, and other federal agencies regularly participate in global disaster relief and recovery efforts. In addition to providing aid through its own channels, the U.S. government maintains official partnerships with scores of private firms and voluntary (non-govern- mental) organizations that are active in the field of international humanitarian relief.3
How did the U.S. government become such a cen- tral player in global disaster response? When—and why—did U.S. officials adopt foreign disaster aid as an instrument of foreign policy? Although the formal bureaucratic structures and legislation that undergird contemporary U.S. international disaster assistance date to the mid- to late-twentieth century, the roots of this system extend deep into the past. Tracing these origins, this essay charts the U.S. government’s role in responding to overseas natural disasters during three periods: the years before 1900, the early twentieth century through World War II, and the three decades following that conflict. As this overview shows, the U.S. government’s gradual entrance into the field of international disaster aid closely paralleled its growth as a global economic, political, and military power, and was driven by multiple and evolving diplomatic aims, economic calculations, and moral considerations.
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The beginnings of the U.S. government’s involvement in international disaster assistance date to the early American Republic. In March 1812 a major earthquake occurred in Venezuela, leaving the city of Caracas in ruin. In response, Congress appropriated $50,000 to aid survivors of this catastrophe while authorizing president James Madison to purchase and ship food to Venezuela.4 But if this episode marked an important early instance of U.S. foreign disaster aid, it was in many ways an exceptional event. It would be decades before official responses like this one became commonplace. For the rest of the century, U.S. governmental aid for overseas natural disasters—and for any humanitarian crisis, for that matter—remained limited at best.5
This did not mean the United States was completely divorced from global disaster relief efforts during the nineteenth century. It was private citizens and voluntary associations, however, rather than the U.S. government, that typically carried them out. In the wake of many foreign catastrophes, American church groups and charitable societies collected and shipped monetary and material contributions abroad. American missionaries and other U.S. citizens living overseas, meanwhile, often assisted survivors of disasters in the communities in which they resided. U.S. policymakers occasionally sup- ported these relief efforts. Congress, for instance, autho- rized U.S. naval ships to carry privately donated aid supplies overseas several times, while U.S. diplomats and consuls in disaster-stricken countries sometimes joined local American communities in relief work. Generally speaking, however, U.S. government officials in the nine- teenth century relinquished international humanitarian assistance to the American voluntary sector.
Several reasons help explain the state’s humanitarian detachment in these years. First, most Americans tended to feel that aiding victims of catastrophes in other coun- tries was not the U.S. government’s responsibility, believ- ing it a task better left to private citizens. Second, even when U.S. policymakers wanted to provide international assistance, they were not particularly well positioned to do so. Small in size and lacking a significant overseas footprint, the U.S. government possessed neither the resources nor the logistical capabilities to respond effec- tively to most distant crises.6
It was not until the early 1900s, as these material and cultural factors began to change, that U.S. policymakers started to contribute to global disaster relief efforts in a more active, consistent manner. In the four decades before World War II, even as private citizens and volun- tary organizations continued to provide the lion’s share of U.S. foreign disaster aid, the state’s involvement in organizing, delivering, and administering disaster assis- tance abroad increased markedly.
U.S. government officials expanded the state’s role in global disaster response, in part, by cultivating formal ties with the American voluntary sector—a form of governance that historians have termed the “associ- ational state.”7 Specifically, U.S. policymakers forged a unique and special partnership with one voluntary association—the American Red Cross (ARC)—and relied on it as their principal instrument for internation- al disaster assistance. Legally recognizing the ARC as the state’s official humanitarian auxiliary, U.S. gov- ernment officials worked closely with the organization to respond to catastrophes abroad.8 In Washington, the ARC’s leadership met regularly with high-ranking members of the State, War, and Naval Departments, cooperating with these individuals to plan and carry out international disaster relief efforts. The State Department provided many services to the ARC as well, including wiring funds abroad and transmitting communications between the ARC and disaster-stricken nations. The Sec- retary of State also instructed U.S. diplomatic and con- sular officials to form local ARC chapters in their host countries to better prepare them for organizing relief efforts locally. During the first four decades of the twen- tieth century, buoyed by this governmental support, the ARC dispatched financial assistance, relief supplies, and occasionally aid workers to dozens of disaster-stricken countries throughout Asia, Europe, and Central and South America.9
Although U.S. officials relied on the quasigovernmen- tal ARC to provide much of the funding and expert guidance for international disaster relief, they did not delegate all humanitarian responsibilities to this organization. U.S. officials also worked with various other non-governmental entities. They cooperated, for example, with philanthropic organizations such as the
The U.S. government’s gradual entrance into the field of international disaster aid closely paralleled its growth as a global economic, political, and military power.
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Rockefeller Foundation, which periodically sent medical supplies and public health experts to disaster-strick- en countries, and with firms like United Fruit and Pan-American Airways, which regularly lent their ships and planes to transport relief supplies abroad. But U.S. officials in the early twentieth century also did more than simply promote voluntary and private humanitar- ian initiatives. To a far greater extent than their nine- teenth century predecessors, they responded to interna- tional catastrophes through the state’s own channels.
The U.S. government’s official disaster relief efforts took a variety of forms. Congress made monetary appro- priations for foreign disaster assistance on several occa- sions, including allocating $200,000 to Martinique and St. Vincent after a 1902 volcanic eruption and $800,000 to Italy following a 1908 earthquake and tsunami.10 Although grants like these remained relatively infre- quent, U.S. officials committed other state resources to disaster-stricken countries more regularly. The War and Naval Departments repeatedly donated food, medicines, tents, and other supplies, often drawing this aid from military stores in the Panama Canal Zone, the Philip- pines, and other U.S. territories. On multiple occasions, they also authorized the use of U.S. Navy ships—and, starting in the 1930s, military aircraft—to transport this aid overseas.11
On the ground in disaster-stricken countries, U.S. government personnel also took part in humanitarian
efforts. New State Department policies charged diplo- matic and consular officials with the tasks of reporting disasters, requesting governmental or ARC assistance, and overseeing the distribution of that aid as it arrived. U.S. soldiers and sailors sometimes deployed to disas- ter-stricken countries as well, where they participated in search-and-rescue operations, debris clearance, and oth- er short-term emergency assistance activities. Between 1900 and 1945, U.S. diplomatic, consular, and military personnel participated in relief efforts for survivors of floods in China, France, and Mexico; earthquakes in Chile, Italy, Nicaragua, Serbia, and Japan; tropical storms in the Dominican Republic and Hong Kong; and dozens of other catastrophes.12 For U.S. officials stationed overseas, disaster assistance had become a customary part of the job.13
The U.S. government’s burgeoning (if ad hoc) involve- ment in foreign disaster assistance between 1900 and 1945 can be attributed to multiple, converging factors, each closely linked to the United States’ concurrent polit- ical, financial, and cultural ascendancy in world affairs. As a rising economic superpower with an expanding diplomatic and military presence globally, the U.S. gov- ernment became progressively more capable of provid- ing foreign assistance. At the same time, outward-look- ing U.S. policymakers had new motivations for aiding disaster survivors in other countries. Many U.S. officials realized the diplomatic potential of their aid, seeing in
American Red Cross nurses escort an injured person to the hospital following the Halifax explosion in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1917. A non-governmental voluntary organization, the American Red Cross served as the U.S. government’s official humanitarian auxiliary and offered aid to international disasters for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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disaster assistance a means to bolster the United States’ image abroad. Others, fearing the political and social unrest that catastrophes fomented, saw foreign disaster aid as strategically important, recognizing it as a way to bring order and stability to disaster-stricken regions. Because catastrophes often affected American foreign trade, investments, and property holdings abroad, many U.S. officials understood that restoring economic con- ditions in other disaster-stricken countries could be in the United States’ financial self-interest. And finally, the impulse to provide international aid reflected a growing conviction, shared by many American policymakers and citizens, that the United States and its government had a moral obligation to improve the world.
Together, these overlapping motivations and world- views helped shape a growing consensus among U.S. government officials on the importance of foreign disaster aid. Support, though, was never universal. Many critics continued to assert that humanitarian assistance was not the federal government’s responsibility. Others argued that resources devoted to foreign aid would be better spent on domestic problems. Still other critics voiced concerns about corruption and feared fostering dependency among aid recipients. But despite these objections, large numbers of U.S. policymakers in the early twentieth century endorsed overseas disaster assis- tance efforts, believing them beneficial not only to the survivors of catastrophes but also to U.S. global interests.
By the conclusion of World War II, propelled by these guiding beliefs and due to the combined efforts of the U.S. government, the ARC, and other parts of the vol- untary sector, the United States had become one of the world’s major donors of bilateral disaster aid.14 Over the next thirty years, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, the United States’ involvement in this humanitarian sphere continued to expand. It also transformed pro- foundly, with the U.S. government assuming a far more prominent and formal role in the financing and delivery of foreign disaster assistance.
Starting in the late 1940s and continuing throughout the 1950s, the state’s participation in global disaster aid increased in several ways. Congress passed a wide slate of foreign aid legislation, further empowering the U.S. government to provide disaster assistance to other countries.15 Most notable was Public Law (PL) 480: The Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954. This law, designed in part to stabilize and subsidize American agriculture, authorized the president to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of surplus U.S. commodities annually as foreign assistance, including to victims of famine and natural disasters.16 Congress also established a series of new foreign
assistance agencies, the predecessors to USAID, which routinely committed funds and manpower to disaster relief overseas. Meanwhile, the Departments of State, Defense, and Agriculture developed new policies and procedures that clarified and formalized their respective duties in the event of international catastrophes.17
During the 1960s and early 1970s, U.S. policymakers broadened the government’s role in international disas- ter aid further still. Under the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act—a landmark piece of legislation, which overhauled the U.S. government’s foreign aid system and created USAID—Congress established a new contingency fund, making available millions of dollars annually for global disaster response.18 A few years later in 1964 a new posi- tion was established within USAID: the Foreign Disaster Relief Coordinator. This individual was charged with overseeing and synchronizing U.S. governmental, mil- itary, ARC, and non-governmental disaster assistance overseas. With the formation of this office, subsequently renamed the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), the U.S. government now included an arm devoted exclusively to the problem of international catastrophes.19 Another crucial policy shift followed roughly a decade later, in 1975, when Congress added a specific chapter on “International Disaster Assistance” to the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act. With this amendment, U.S. policymakers affirmatively established the U.S. government’s authority to provide international disas- ter aid while codifying the state’s role in global disaster response and prevention.20
Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s, even as U.S. policymakers steadily broadened the state’s role in foreign disaster assistance, they continued to regard American voluntary organizations as critical humani- tarian partners. Yet at the same time, the U.S. govern- ment’s relationship with the voluntary sector trans- formed in significant ways. While the American Red
The impulse to provide international aid reflected a
growing conviction, shared by many American policymakers and citizens, that the United
States and its government had a moral obligation to improve
the world.
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Cross maintained its position as a leading provider of U.S. international disaster aid, a host of other voluntary associations—including Church World Service, Catholic Relief Services, Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE), and dozens of others—steadily joined the ARC in this field. In the postwar decades, these organizations, too, became major donors of money, supplies, and other forms of foreign disaster assistance.21
Much as they had done with the ARC, U.S. officials cultivated a special relationship with many of these voluntary organizations, lending state support to their overseas humanitarian work. In 1946 the Truman administration established an Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA), designed to create a more formal link between the U.S. government and American voluntary organizations engaged in interna- tional relief and development.22 Although registration with ACVFA was not mandatory, its members enjoyed distinct advantages. Specifically, Congress reimbursed registered voluntary organizations for the expense of shipping relief supplies overseas and granted them access to surplus U.S. commodities for international humani- tarian operations.23 These government subsidies, to the tune of millions of dollars per year, greatly enhanced the voluntary sector’s ability to provide international disas- ter aid in the name of the United States.
In the thirty years after the Second World War, U.S. policymakers greatly expanded the federal government’s foreign disaster assistance commitments. U.S. officials, together with their chosen partners in the voluntary sec- tor, carried out humanitarian responses to earthquakes in Algeria, Chile, India, Iran, Nicaragua, Peru, and Yugoslavia; to tropical storms in Haiti, Honduras, South Korea, and East Pakistan; to floods in Great Britain, East and West Germany, Guatemala, Mexico, and Vietnam; and to scores of other natural disasters.24
The growth and institutionalization of the state’s role in disaster aid across these three decades was the prod- uct of both continuity and change. On the one hand, many of the same diplomatic and strategic objectives, financial concerns, and moral impulses that had driven U.S. foreign disaster assistance earlier in the century continued to compel U.S. officials to respond to inter- national catastrophes in the postwar era. On the other hand, fundamental shifts in postwar U.S. international relations gave U.S. policymakers new motivations for formalizing and expanding the state’s humanitarian commitments while simultaneously enhancing their ability to do so. More specifically, confronting the novel challenges of the global Cold War, decolonization, and international development, U.S. officials grew more convinced than ever of the political and economic
importance of foreign disaster aid. Now unrivaled in its military, economic, and political strength, and boasting an enormous global military and diplomatic footprint, the postwar U.S. government had unparalleled resources to respond rapidly and vigorously to overseas disasters.
If and when U.S. officials chose to do so, that is. For despite these changes, U.S. policymakers never achieved total consensus on the place foreign disaster assistance should occupy in U.S. foreign affairs. They debated how (and whether) to respond to specific crises, and they continued to argue over the merits of international aid. Broadly speaking, however, postwar American policy- makers accepted—and in some cases embraced—the principle of providing disaster assistance to other coun- tries and put this principle into practice on an increas- ingly consistent basis. As a result, the U.S. government secured its status as the world’s leading donor of bilateral disaster aid.
By the mid-1970s U.S. policymakers were providing millions of dollars’ worth of cash, food, military support, and other aid to dozens of disaster-stricken countries every year.25 By this same point, much of the bureaucrat- ic and legal apparatus of U.S. foreign disaster assistance that exists today had been erected. The system described in this essay’s introduction, in short, had largely been established.
Since the mid-1970s, the U.S. government’s approach to bilateral disaster assistance has naturally continued to evolve.26 Yet a look back at the historical foundations of this system—born in the early nineteenth century, expanded in the early twentieth century, and institution- alized during the three decades after World War II— reminds us that responding to overseas disasters is hard- ly a novel U.S. foreign policy activity. To the contrary, it has long been an important element of U.S. international affairs. What, though, will the future hold? Examining how the U.S. government has responded to recent global catastrophes—among them Hurricanes Irma and Maria in the Caribbean, severe flooding in Sierra Leone and Bangladesh, and the September 2017 earthquake in Mexico City—may offer some clues. By critically analyz- ing the U.S. responses to these and other contemporary crises—by studying their successes and failures, and by comparing them to historical precedents—we stand to improve the effectiveness and ethics of U.S. foreign disaster assistance, both in our present moment and in the years to come. TAH
This essay draws on research from my current book proj- ect, Catastrophic Diplomacy: A History of U.S. Respons- es to Global Natural Disaster.
(endnotes on next page)
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ENDNOTES
1. Measured by total expenditures, the United States is the world’s largest national donor of emergency aid; mea- sured as a percentage of national income, however, it ranks below many other countries. See “The Biggest Donors of 2016,” Integrated Regional Information Networks, accessed Nov. 5, 2017, https://www.irinnews.org/maps-and- graphics/2016/12/20/biggest-donors-2016.
2. These include catastrophes triggered by natural hazards, such as earthquakes, tropical storms, floods, or drought, as well as crises engendered by famine, war, and complex humanitarian emergencies. In recent years, the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) has spent nearly two billion dollars annually on these diverse aid activ- ities. Although this may sound like a considerable amount, it is important to keep these figures in perspective: less than 1% of the U.S. federal budget is devoted to foreign assistance in total; OFDA’s budget, in turn, amounts to roughly 1% of that. See “USAID/OFDA Annual Reports,” United States Agency for International Development, accessed Nov. 5, 2017, https://www.usaid.gov/what-we-do/working-crises-and-conflict/crisis-response/resources/ annual-reports.
3. For a look at the contemporary system in greater detail, see Rhoda Margesson, International Crises and Disasters: U.S. Humanitarian Assistance Response Mechanisms, CRS Report No. RL33769 (2015), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/ RL33769.pdf.
4. An Act for the Relief of the Citizens of Venezuela, 2 Stat. 730 (1812). 5. For occasional exceptions, see “List of acts and resolutions of Congress granting relief to the people of foreign
nations,” Congressional Record, 60th Cong., 2d sess., 1909, p. 453. 6. Claims in the preceding two paragraphs draw from my own research, but see also Merle Curti, American Philan-
thropy Abroad: A History (1963), 1–192. 7. Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (2015). See also Emily
Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (1982). 8. Founded in 1881, the ARC received Congressional charters in 1900 and 1905, establishing the ARC’s status as the
U.S. government’s official humanitarian auxiliary. Specifically, these charters charged the ARC to “carry on a sys- tem of national and international relief in time of peace” and with “mitigating the sufferings caused by pestilence, famine, fire, floods, and other great national calamities.” 1900 Congressional Charter of Incorporation, 31 Stat. (1900), 277–80; and 1905 Congressional Charter of Incorporation, 33 Stat. (1905), 599–602. For the early history of the ARC, see Marian Moser Jones, The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (2013), 1–96.
9. Julia F. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (2013), 40–47, 187–91; Julia Irwin, “Connected by Calamity: The United States, the League of Red Cross Societies, and Transnational Disaster Assistance after the First World War,” Moving the Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements, 57 (2017), 57–76.
10. An Act For the relief of citizens of the French West Indies, PL 57-112, 32 Stat. (1902), 198; An Act For the Relief of Citizens of Italy, PL 60-184, 35 Stat. (1909), 584.
11. Although most of these responses remained relatively small in scale, the U.S. government occasionally made quite substantial aid commitments. An especially noteworthy example occurred after the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, when U.S. officials delivered roughly $8,000,000 worth of army and navy supplies and services to Japan. Col. Charles Burnett, “Report on Relief Activities in Japan,” January 31, 1924, Central Decimal File 894.48 (1910–1929), Records of the Department of State, RG 59, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
12. Records relating to these (and other) U.S. foreign disaster responses appear in several archival collections at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Although these records are by no means exhaustive, they are a good place to begin conducting primary research. The Central Decimal Files of both the U.S. Depart- ment of State (RG 59) and U.S. Foreign Service Posts (RG 84) both contain abundant correspondence on interna- tional disasters and calamities, filed under subject number 848. The records of the American National Red Cross (RG 200) also contain ample material on these topics.
13. Irwin, “Connected by Calamity”; William N. Tilchin, “Theodore Roosevelt, Anglo-American Relations, and the Jamaica Incident of 1907,” Diplomatic History, 19 (Summer 1995), 385–406; Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad, 193–217, 333–54.
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14. It had become a “humanitarian superpower,” to use historian Daniel Maul’s evocative term. Daniel Roger Maul, “The Rise of a Humanitarian Superpower: American NGOs and International Relief, 1917–1945,” in Internation- alism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World: The Pasts of the Present, ed. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro (2017), 127–46.
15. Raymond H. Geselbracht, ed., Foreign Aid and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman (2015). 16. The Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954, PL 83-480, 68 Stat. (1954), 454–59. On the first
use of this legislation for foreign disaster aid, see Julia F. Irwin, “Raging Rivers and Propaganda Weevils: Trans- national Disaster Relief, Cold War Politics, and the 1954 Danube and Elbe Floods,” Diplomatic History, 40 (Nov. 2016), 893–921. See also Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace (2009), 11–41; Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (2010).
17. Operations Coordinating Board, “Foreign Disaster Relief Operations,” Sept. 14, 1956, rev. Aug. 22, 1958, box 1660, Records of the American National Red Cross, RG 200, Series 4, NARA.
18. Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, PL 87-22 U.S.C. 2371 (1961). For a broader overview of U.S. foreign assistance during this period, see Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (2010).
19. USAID, “Foreign Disaster Emergency Relief: Introduction and Definition,” M.S. 1562.1, Oct. 9, 1964, box 1660, RG 200, Series 4, NARA. For more on OFDA’s history, see Richard Stuart Olson, “The Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID): A Critical Junc- ture Analysis, 1964–2003,” 2005, accessed Nov. 5, 2017, http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/Pnadc353.pdf.
20. See International Development and Food Assistance Act of 1975, PL 94-161, 89 Stat. (1975), 849–69. 21. Rachel M. McCleary, Global Compassion: Private Voluntary Organizations and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1939
(2009); Joshua Hideo Mather, Citizens of Compassion: Relief, Development, and State-Private Cooperation in U.S. Foreign Relations, 1939–1973 (2015); Heike Wieters, The NGO CARE and Food Aid from America, 1945–80: ‘Show- ered with Kindness’? (2017).
22. ACVFA absorbed many of the regulatory and oversight functions of two Second World War predecessor agencies: the President’s Committee on War Relief Agencies and its successor, the President’s War Relief Control Board, founded in 1941 and 1942 respectively.
23. First appearing in the 1947 Interim Aid Act, ocean freight subsidies were extended under the 1948 Economic Cooperation Act and then retained as part of the Mutual Security legislation of the early 1950s. Congress first granted voluntary organizations access to surplus food commodities in the Agricultural Act of 1949, later expand- ing this program as part of PL-480 in 1954. See McCleary, Global Compassion; and Mather, “Citizens of Compas- sion.”
24. In addition to consulting the archival collections described in footnote 12, beginning researchers interested in disaster response during the postwar era may wish to consult the Records of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Agen- cies, 1948–1961 (RG 469) and Records of USAID (RG 286), both housed at NARA, as well as the Records of the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service (Collection MC 655), housed at Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Library, New Brunswick, NJ.
25. OFDA’s annual reports and reports of many of its specific disaster aid operations, which provide basic details on these efforts, have been digitized. These can be found by searching the “Development Experience Clearing House,” USAID, last accessed Nov. 8, 2017, https://dec.usaid.gov/dec/content/search.aspx.
26. See for example A. Cooper Drury, Richard Stuart Olson, and Douglas A. Van Belle, “The Politics of Humanitarian Aid: U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, 1964–1995,” Journal of Politics, 67 (May 2005), 454–73; Alexander Poster, A Hierarchy of Survival: The United States and the Negotiation of International Disaster Relief, 1981–1989 (2010). For a discussion of how the international community’s response to disasters evolved over the twentieth century (and how the United States relates to the international system), see Lukas Schemper, Humanity Unprepared: Interna- tional Organization and the Management of Natural Disaster (1921–1991) (2016).
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NEWS OF THE OAH NEWS FOR AND ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS
2017 Fall Executive Board Meeting The Executive Board met for their annual fall meeting in Chicago on December 9. During the meeting, the board
took the following actions: • Approved the Consent Agenda as presented in the
2017 Fall Board Book of the April 6, 2017, meeting, the minutes, and all committee reports.
• Approved a resolution of gratitude and thanks to OAH Director of Operations Nancy Croker for her service to the Organization. (Ms. Croker retired on December 31, 2017.)
• The OAH recognizes and thanks former OAH Membership Committee members and previous chairs Cary Winz and Steve Kneeshaw for their many years of service.
• Approved the appointments to OAH committees and boards as set by the OAH Committee on Committees.
• The OAH thanks all Distinguished Lecturers who donated one or more lecture fee to the OAH in the past fiscal year.
• Approved the request of the LGBTQ+ Committee to expand the size of their committee by one for the inclusion of a graduate student member.
• Approved AHA statement on contingent faculty. (Read the AHA statement here: https://www.historians.org/ jobs-and-professional-development/statements- standards-and-guidelines-of-the-discipline/ standards-for-part-time-adjunct-and-contingent- faculty-(2011))
• Approved OAH participation in the American Council of Learned Societies’ effort to effectively and quickly issue statements on pressing matters as appropriate.
• Approved endorsing the revised AHA statement on Dual Enrollment/Concurrent Enrollment standards. (Read the revised AHA statement here: https://www. historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/ statements-standards-and-guidelines-of-the- discipline/statement-on-dual-enrollment/ concurrent-enrollment-(2016))
• Approved the recipient of the 2018 Friend of History Award.
• Approved the recipient of the 2018 Distinguished Service Award.
• Approved the removal of the Distinguished Service Award nominations from the OAH Election Ballot. Nominations will now be directly solicited from the membership via Update.
• Accepted the FY 2016-2017 Auditor’s Report showing total revenues of $3,834,019 and expenses of $3,457,664 and a net overall gain (restricted and unrestricted assets) of $376,353.
Update from the Raintree House INTRODUCING OAH INSIGHTS We are pleased to announce OAH Insights, where you can find information about issues affecting the history community, current happening around the profession, and updates from the OAH, its committees, and partners. This page is intended to keep our community of U.S. historians up to date on all things related to the teaching and practice of history.
We welcome submissions from around the history community. Email us at [email protected] with “OAH Insights” as your subject line.
INSIGHTS U.S. History Happens Here
Click to see our latest posts!
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Now Accepting Mentees for the “Hey, I Know Your Work!” Annual Meeting Mentorship Program
We invite graduate students, recent graduates, or those in the early stages of their career to meet with seasoned scholars and history practitioners to discuss their research, professional aspirations, or simply to get acquainted.
New for 2018: The OAH Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA Histories and the Society for the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) are partnering with the OAH to provide mentors who are specifically interested in mentoring attendees of color or who are interested in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Look for ALANA or SHGAPE endorsed mentors in the listing on the OAH website.
Potential mentees provide the OAH with their full contact information, bio, and a list of their top three mentor choices. All mentors are listed on the OAH website at http://www.oah.org/meetings-events/2018/mentorship/.
OAH staff will assign up to three mentees to a mentor based on availability. In March 2018, all mentors and mentees are connected with each other to finalize their scheduled meeting time. During the event, mentors and mentees meet for coffee and conversation at a predetermined time. Meetings last between forty-five minutes and one hour.
Many attendees recall being lonely and even a bit isolated at a large academic conference and then seeing a well-known historian (or recognizing a name on a badge) in the elevator or hotel corridor and wishing for an introduction. This program takes the awkwardness out of those introductions and helps forge professional and personal relationships.
If you would like to participate in this year’s program, please submit your contact information, a short bio, and your top three mentor choices. Mentors can only meet with up to three mentees; those slots will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. Please see the list of mentors at the url above and email your selection and information to [email protected].
Renew Early and Win Congratulations to the following six members who won a prize in our annual Renew Early and Win contest: • GRAND PRIZE – $125 Powell’s Books gift card and Life
subscription to Library Thing ($25 value) – Kenneth Noe • FIRST PRIZE – One free night at the Sacramento Hyatt
during the annual meeting – Christine L. Manganaro • SECOND PRIZE (2 winners) – Free 2018 Annual
Meeting registration – Celina Dunlop and Kurt R. Knierim
• THIRD PRIZE (2 winners) - $50 Powell’s Books gift card – Carolyn W. Johnson and Jere William Roberson
Thank you to everyone who participated in the drawing! Your early renewal reduces paper usage and saves the OAH money on postage and printing.
Support for Part-Time and Adjunct Faculty
The OAH Executive Board is pleased to again offer OAH Annual Meeting travel grants to part-time and adjunct faculty who are currently serving on OAH committees..
Current OAH committee members who are part-time or adjunct and have no access to travel funds may have the conference registration fee waived and be reimbursed up to $500 for expenses incurred by attending the annual meeting in Sacramento this year. Those eligible should email the OAH Executive Director, Katherine Finley, at [email protected], to apply.
“Hey, I Know Your Work!” mentorship program
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P O S T
LEARNING TO RATION... A group of school children in Washington, D.C., set up a make-pretend grocery shop to learn the importance of war rationing in 1943.
PHOTO COURTESY OF LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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Awards / Prizes
oah.org/programs/awards
Submit a book—published during the period January 1, 2016 through December 31, 2018—by the May 1, 2018, deadline for recognition at the 2019 OAH Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For further information and application instructions, visit: http://www.oah. org/programs/awards/willi-paul-adams-award/.
The award is named for Willi Paul Adams, an active member of the Organization of American Historians in Germany and a tireless advocate of the internationalization of American history.
Honoring achievements in the field of American history, the OAH gives more than two dozen awards, prizes, fellowships, and grants annually. Visit the OAH Web site for more information.
Willi Paul Adams Award
2017 OAH Annual Meeting Awards Ceremony Audience
for the best book on American history
published in a foreign language
Listen to History
jah.oah.org/podcast
American HistoryJournal of podcasts
ENJOY OUR FIRST INSTALLMENT WITH NEW EXECUTIVE EDITOR BENJAMIN IRVIN!
NEW A Special Podcast on Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican Diaspora—December 2017
With Anne Macpherson, associate professor of history at the College of Brockport, SUNY, and Michael Staudenmaier, visiting assistant professor of history and Latin American and Latino/a studies at Aurora University
PR EV IOUS INSTALLMENTS INCLUDE:
“Sovereign Lords” and “Dependent Administrators”: Artigan Privateers, Atlantic Borderwaters, and State Building in the Early Nineteenth Century — December 2016
With Tyson Reeder, volume coeditor for The Joseph Smith Papers in Salt Lake City, Utah
Setting the Table: Historians, Popular Writers, and Food History — September 2016
With Matt Garcia, director of the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University
Reunion and Reconciliation, Reviewed and Reconsidered —June 2016
With Nina Silber, Professor of History at Boston University
History and Presence — May 2016
With Robert Orsi, the first holder of the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University.
