When hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other disasters strike, we
count our losses, search for causes, commiserate with victims, and
initiate relief efforts. Amply illustrated and expansively researched,
Inventing Disaster explains the origins and development of this
predictable, even ritualized, culture of calamity over three centuries,
exploring its roots in the revolutions in science, information, and
emotion that were part of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and
America.
Beginning with the collapse of the early seventeenth-century Jamestown
colony, ending with the deadly Johnstown flood of 1889, and highlighting
fires, epidemics, earthquakes, and exploding steamboats along the way,
Cynthia A. Kierner tells horrific stories of culturally significant
calamities and their victims and charts efforts to explain, prevent, and
relieve disaster-related losses. Although how we interpret and respond
to disasters has changed in some ways since the nineteenth century,
Kierner demonstrates that, for better or worse, the intellectual,
economic, and political environments of earlier eras forged our own
twenty-first-century approach to disaster, shaping the stories we tell,
the precautions we ponder, and the remedies we prescribe for
disaster-ravaged communities.