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  • Introduction: The American Politics of Disaster from the Civil War to the Present
  • Gareth Davies (bio)

American historians and social scientists are evincing a growing interest in the subject of disaster. True, there has been never been any shortage of journalistic and novelistic literature on particular catastrophes, focusing on themes of tragedy and renewal, on human drama, villainy and heroism.1 But until recently there was a surprising paucity of serious academic writing either on particular disasters or on the broad subject of how American society has responded to catastrophe. This is no longer the case: since the mid-1980s, a series of important books has sought to employ disaster not simply as a vehicle for telling a good story but as a way of analyzing broader themes in national life: humanitarianism, the growth of government, environmentalism, social and racial injustice, and the list could easily be extended.2 What is more, this trend has been accelerating, and one small symptom of that trajectory was the presence on the 2010 Policy History Conference program of no fewer than three panels on American disaster politics (this was the origin of the present volume).3

Why should this be? Doubtless the pattern owes something to recent events: to the terrorist attacks of 2001 and Hurricane Katrina, most obviously, but also to a series of vivid and widely publicized natural disasters elsewhere in the world (2010 saw the Haitian earthquake, massive flooding in China and Australia, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, a tsunami in Indonesia). Still, every period in human history has featured catastrophic epidemics, fires, and climatic and seismological disasters, and indeed the human toll of disaster is probably lower in the twenty-first century than it was during the past, so there must be more to the story than this. Perhaps disasters are [End Page 299] especially salient now because of the ever more sensational and immediate way in which they are covered, compared to the past.4 Certainly it is differential media coverage, and not just the level of destruction in property and human life, that explains why some disasters resonate more than others—why Hurricane Audrey, which killed six hundred people in rural western Louisiana in 1957 should be largely unknown, while Hurricane Betsy, which barreled through metropolitan New Orleans in 1965 and killed only eighty-one, is much more familiar.5 Now, in the age not just of twenty-four-hour news and satellite television but of social media, few inhabited locations are so remote that a major climatic or seismological event will go unnoticed, or fail to produce newsworthy, tear-jerking news stories.

Also, if disasters now generally cause fewer fatalities than in the past (this is one reason why the enormous death toll of Katrina was so shocking), it is also paradoxically the case that they are becoming more expensive, and this too helps to explain why the subject of catastrophe has such salience in academia and in society generally. A 2008 attempt to calculate the most expensive global catastrophes since 1970 highlights this trend: half of them had taken place during the previous four years, and all of them were from the second half of the period under review (see Table 1):


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Table 1.

Costliest Global Catastrophes, 1970–2007

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Quite apart from this temporal concentration, one is struck in this table by the geographic concentration of these disasters, and by the disparity between their immense financial cost and the comparatively low death tolls, Katrina apart: eight of the ten most expensive events hit the United States, and not one of them features on lists of the deadliest natural disasters.6 This pattern reflects the high and growing concentration of expensive real estate located in especially disaster-prone sections of the United States, together with the limited effectiveness of federal efforts to dissuade such development and make such locations more resilient.7

Another development that has presumably helped to stimulate new writing on both contemporary and historical disaster is the growing environmental sensibility of the past half-century.8 Disasters provide an obvious focus for historians and geographers interested in highlighting the vulnerability of human...

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