The stunning story of one of America's great disasters, a preventable
tragedy of Gilded Age America, brilliantly told by master historian
David McCullough.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a
booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving
for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the
mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to
create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons
of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry
Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated warnings of possible
danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the
dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain,
smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people. It was a
tragedy that became a national scandal.
Graced by David McCullough's remarkable gift for writing richly
textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an
absorbing, classic portrait of life in nineteenth-century America, of
overweening confidence, of energy, and of tragedy. It also offers a
powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of
assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are
necessarily behaving responsibly.
