Rethinking American Disasters ed. by Cynthia A. Kierner, Matthew Mulcahy and Liz Skilton (review)

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• Rethinking American Disasters ed. by Cynthia A. Kierner, Matthew Mulcahy and Liz Skilton
• Robin L. Roe

Rethinking American Disasters. Edited by Cynthia A. Kierner, Matthew Mulcahy, and Liz Skilton. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. [viii], 247. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-7993-2.)

Since the early 2000s, major disasters have had serious consequences for a growing number of Americans, leading to both a growing public awareness and contentious debates over response and interpretation. Scholarly work on historical disasters, almost nonexistent in 2000, has also expanded rapidly, starting with the interdisciplinary collection of essays American Disasters (New York, 2001), edited by Steven Biel. Now a new collection of interdisciplinary essays, Rethinking American Disasters, edited by Cynthia A. Kierner, Matthew Mulcahy, and Liz Skilton, reexamines the key questions that drive American disaster studies.

The editors clearly introduce the essential scholarly debates about historical disasters, including the most fundamental question: What is a disaster? The answer is quite complex, given the breadth of events that can be identified as [End Page 412] disasters, but at its most simplified, “A ‘disaster’ can be any incident that negatively impacts a group of individuals” (p. 3). Human loss of some sort, in other words, creates disaster out of incident. These essays draw a small sample from that wide scope, ranging from the geological, to floods and hurricanes, to biological epidemics and cancer rates. Contributors use cultural, political, and environmental lenses for their analysis, though these often overlap. Temporally, contributions range from the early British North American colonies to an analysis of the recent collision of diabetes and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19).

Matthew Mulcahy, Benjamin L. Carp, and Jonathan Todd Hancock each examine early public perceptions of disasters, including how authorities tried to control narratives about such events, covering days of prayer and fasting in colonial New England, conspiracy theories during the American Revolution, and even a volcano hoax during the already disastrous 1810s. But by the 1810s, Americans were slowly turning from providentialism to science, even if flawed, to understand geological disasters. Scott Gabriel Knowles and Ashley Rogers, Richard M. Mizelle Jr., and Sarah E. Naramore focus on longer histories of medical disasters: public response to yellow fever between 1793 and 1820; the tragic interplay of diabetes, COVID-19, race, and class; and the continuity of racial violence, from enslaved African Americans on the German Coast of Louisiana to their descendants, who experience extraordinarily high cancer rates tied to petrochemical pollution. Fire and public perceptions tie together essays by Jane Manners, Cynthia A. Kierner, and Alyssa Toby Fahringer, including a legal analysis of liability during the Great New York Fire of 1835, the gendered sensationalist reporting on antebellum steamboat explosions, and the role of disasters, including an 1870 fire, in creating sympathy in the North for post–Civil War Richmond, Virginia. Floods and hurricanes provide Tom Wickman, Caroline Grego, and Liz Skilton with material for a microhistory of a flood-prone Connecticut island farm, an analysis of the racial politics of South Carolina coastal hurricanes between 1893 and 1940, and an examination of the tragic consequences of the confusing language of risk during the 2016 Louisiana floods.

The organization is generally chronological, which some readers may prefer, while others may find it less accessible than one grouped by topic. Though brief, each essay effectively conveys how historical disasters were manipulated by those with power to control narratives and influence perceptions, whether to drive a demand for change or to protect an entrenched system. Contributors have generally made excellent and thoughtful use of their sources, and essays often expand older frameworks to connect the longer histories that created or contributed to tragedies. With the breadth of disasters and analytical lenses, this collection would provide a useful introduction to any reader interested in the history of disaster.

Robin L. Roe Texas A&M University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...