Long after the dead have been buried, and lives and property rebuilt, the social and cultural impact of disasters
lingers. Examining immediate and long term responses to such disasters as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the
Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the Challenger explosion, American Disasters explores what natural and man made catastrophes
reveal about the societies in which they occur.
Ranging widely, essayists here examine the 1900 storm that ravaged Galveston, Texas, the Great Chicago Fire of
1871, the Titanic sinking, the Northridge earthquake, the crash of Air Florida Flight 90, the 1977 Chicago El train
crash, and many other devastating events. These catastrophes elicited vastly different responses, and thus raise
a number of important questions. How, for example did African Americans, feminists, and labor activists respond
to the Titanic disaster? Why did the El train crash take on such symbolic meaning for the citizens of Chicago?
In what ways did the San Francisco earthquake reaffirm rather than challenge a predominant faith in progress?
Taken together, these essays explain how and why disasters are transformative, how people make sense of them, how
they function as social dramas during which communities and the nation think aloud about themselves and their direction.
Table of Contents
1. Capital
1. "A Tempestuous Spirit Called Hurri Cano": Hurricanes and Colonial Society in the British Greater
Caribbean
2. "The Hungry Year": 1789 on the Northern Border of Revolutionary America
3. What Comes Down Must Go Up: Why Disasters Have Been Good for American Capitalism
4. Smoke and Mirrors: The San Francisco Earthquake and Seismic Denial
II. Faith
5. Faith and Doubt: The Imaginative Dimensions of the Great Chicago Fire
6. Distant Disasters, Local Fears: Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Revolution, and Passion in The Atlantic Monthly, 1880-84
7. "Nothing Ends Here": Managing the Challenger Disaster
III. Community
8. "It Must Be Made Safe": Galveston, Texas, and the 1900 Storm
9. Chicago on the Brink: Media Trauma and the 1977 L-Train Crash
10. The Day the Water Died: The Exxon Valdez Disaster and Indigenous Culture
IV. Possibility
11. "Unknown and Unsung": Feminist, African American, and Radical Responses to the Titanic Disaster
12. "Piecing Together What History Has Broken to Bits": Air Florida Flight 90 and the PATCO Disaster
13. The Exxon Valdez and Alaska in the American Imagination
