Epilogue

The epilogue skips ahead to the Johnstown flood of 1889, the deadliest disaster to date in U.S. history, and argues that the response to this debacle—due to because of advancements in communication and photography, and the advent of the American Red Cross—was in most respects comparable to that in twenty-first-century America. The main difference was the absence of federal involvement in disaster relief at Johnstown, though the U.S. government began providing disaster relief on an ad hoc basis in the post-Civil War era. The epilogue then examines the normalization of federal involvement in disaster relief and prevention in the twentieth century and the impact of social media on contemporary disaster reporting and relief efforts.

Introduction

The modern American approach to disaster is a cultural construction, a product of the period that historians define loosely as the modern era. When disaster strikes, people search for causes, assess culpability and costs, commiserate with victims (both as individuals and as a more abstract collective), and initiate various sorts of private and public relief efforts. Inventing Disaster traces the historical origins of this modern culture of disaster to three inter-related developments: the spread of information via trade, travel, and print; new Enlightenment ideas about science and human agency; and growing appreciation for the capacity to respond to the suffering of others with heartfelt emotion and benevolence, a quality known as sensibility. The book's introduction describes the modern culture of calamity and gives an overview of the chapters' contents, situating this study in both the cultural history of the Atlantic world and in interdisciplinary field of Disaster Studies.

Devastation without Disaster

The English colony established at Jamestown in 1607 was a disaster by any modern measure. Famine, disease, hurricanes, and violence killed roughly three-quarters of the 4,200 settlers who arrived there by 1622. This chapter argues that contemporaries viewed neither Jamestown nor the specific calamities that occurred there as disasters in the modern sense and that most public discussions of the colonists’ sufferings instead characterized them as either signs from God or (less commonly) the results of human mistakes or malfeasance. This pre-modern response to adversity had two related consequences. First, interpreting calamities within a providential framework elided human agency as the cause of suffering and therefore precluded temporal efforts to prevent future tragedies. Second, when famines and disease, hurricanes and earthquakes, were divine portents, they evoked horror or wonder, but not the human-centered emotions that would animate later responses to such calamities.

Exploding Steamboats and the Culture of Calamity

The reconceptualization of disasters as recurring phenomena that evoked meaningful public debate came only with the virtual epidemic of steamboat explosions that began in the 1820s. This chapter examines public response to steamboat explosions and the cumulative impact of hundreds of deadly wrecks on popular culture and public policy. Because of their frequency and horror, and also because they juxtaposed progress and destruction, steamboat explosions resonated deeply with Americans and figured prominently in the popular culture of the antebellum era. This chapter shows how pervasive representations of steamboat disasters, in both words and images, helped many Americans to imagine themselves as prospective victims of steamboat explosions. Creating an imagined community of shipwreck casualties, in turn, gave rise to public outcry that led to the first serious efforts on the part of the U.S. Congress to regulate private business corporations.

Narrating Disaster

This chapter charts the evolution of published disaster narratives through the first four decades of the eighteenth century, exploring connections between disaster stories, maritime trade, and an emerging culture of sensibility. It focuses particularly on shipwrecks, which exposed both people and property to unusual levels of vulnerability and risk on a fairly regular basis. For that reason, and also because ships’ captains were crucial sources of information for printers, shipwreck stories were the most common early disaster narratives. Although newspapers initially printed only perfunctory reports of specific incidents, by the 1730s they increasingly published human-interest stories about victims of shipwrecks and other catastrophes. Some versions of these stories—especially those told by the clergy—continued to interpret calamity as divine judgment, but narratives published in newspapers were overwhelmingly secular and more descriptive than explanatory. Like novels, these disaster stories served to engage readers’ emotions to evoke benevolence not repentance, sympathy not horror.

Benevolent Empire

This chapter examines five disasters that occurred in Britain's American colonies between 1760 and 1780: fires in Boston and Montreal, a massive flood in Virginia, and two unusually severe hurricanes in the British West Indies. It examines the rhetoric and realities of imperial disaster relief in an era most commonly associated with the imperial crisis that ultimately led to the American Revolution. When disaster struck their communities, colonists invoked sensibility, benevolence, and the bonds of empire, exploiting dense networks of transatlantic, intercolonial, and local connections in hopes of obtaining assistance from government officials, merchants, and others. In the decades after Lisbon, Britons on both sides of the Atlantic agreed in seeing disaster relief as benevolence provided to sufferers throughout their far-flung empire, though the performance of benevolence was also a tool of statecraft deployed to mitigate colonial discontent, strengthen the imperial bond, and solidify a shared sense of British national identity.

Disaster Nation

Americans experienced changes in both the quality and quantity of disasters in the post-revolutionary era. On the one hand, they were increasingly vulnerable to new categories of calamities, as fires and epidemics proliferated in the growing cities of the early republic. On the other hand, they inhabited a print-saturated environment in which such episodes were widely reported and sometimes assumed national significance. Focusing primarily on Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic in 1793 and fires in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Richmond, Virginia, this chapter addresses two related themes: how U.S. leaders envisioned the role of the state in disaster relief and how disaster stories contributed to the creation of an American national identity. It shows that by publicizing private philanthropic efforts that arose in response to disasters, print culture encouraged readers to see themselves as virtuous and charitable, even as their government rejected the British model of state-sponsored humanitarian aid, and that by chronicling the suffering of individuals, increasingly sensational accounts encouraged readers to see disasters as personal tragedies rather than public problems.

Catastrophe in an Age of Enlightenment

The greatest European calamity of the eighteenth century, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake is often called the “first modern disaster” in part because of the vigorously rational inquiry into its causes, which informed a self-consciously scientific post-disaster rebuilding effort. Examining responses to the Lisbon earthquake (and to the seemingly related Cape Ann earthquake, which occurred in Massachusetts three weeks later), this chapter interprets these episodes as a cultural event that drew on both Enlightenment rationalism and ideals of sensibility to forge a modern culture of disaster in embryonic form. This chapter focuses on three key developments: the interplay between religious and scientific explanations for the earthquake, even among some clergy; its unusually rich popular culture, which included unprecedented numbers of visual representations and Voltaire’s Candide, along with widely circulated eyewitness accounts by merchants and sea captains; and the remarkable international relief effort to aid earthquake victims, which included significant and widely publicized contributions from King George II and the British Parliament.