Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society

Essay on Sources

ESSAY ON SOURCES This is the first large-scale history of risk in American society. It is built from extensive research in original sources coupled with information and analysis gleaned from a wide varietyofbooksandarticles.Thefollowingbibliographicessayisnotexhaustive.Instead, itisintendedtoguidereaderstowardworksIfoundparticularlyusefulorthatareconsidered by specialists as definitive with regard to topics in this book. Theoreticalandcontemporarystudiesofrisknumberinthethousands.Severalscholars have created useful primers on the sociology and anthropology of risk, notably SheldonKrimskyandDominicGolding ,eds.,SocialTheoriesofRisk(Westport,CT,andLondon: Praeger, 1992); and Deborah Lupton, Risk (Key Ideas) (New York: Routledge, 1999). The foundational text of the risk society hypothesis is Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, trans. M. Ritter (London: Sage, 1992). Beck has continued to publish a series of volumes restating and elaboratinghisbasichypothesis.Foracomplementarytakeon“reflexivemodernity,”see AnthonyGiddens,ModernityandSelfIdentity:SelfandSocietyintheLate-ModernAge(Cambridge : Polity Press, 1991). Charles Perrow’s Normal Risks: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984) provides a readable guide to the pattern of accidents in complex systems. My book also historicizes insights of some psychologists who study risk perception. An excellent introduction to this literature is Glynis M. Breakwell, The Psychology of Risk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Michael Apter’s The DangerousEdge:ThePsychologyofExcitement(New York: Free Press, 1992) provided a particularly useful framework for explaining elective risk taking. Since I began this project, the term risk and concepts created by social theorists have begun to appear more frequently in works of history. Bill Luckin and Roger Cooter, Accidents in History: Injuries, Fatalities, and Social Relations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), is a pioneeringworkinthisvein.Foraparticularlygoodrecentexampleofarisk-orientedhistory , see John Burnham, Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and the Misfits of the Machine Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). This book is also intended as a contribution to the literature on the social history of technology. It examines, in particular, the ways technology and culture have shaped each other over time. For more on the conceptual frameworks of social construction and mutual shaping of technology and society, see Nina E. Lerman, Arwen Palmer Mohun, and Ruth Oldenziel, “Versatile Tools: Gender Analysis and the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 38 (Jan. 1997): 3. See also Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics ?,” Daedalus 109 (1980): 121–31; Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, The Social 314 e s s a y o n s o u r c e s Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999); and Wiebe E. Bijker and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Societies: Studies in Socio-Technical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). The topic of risk in early America has only begun to attract scholarly attention after a very long period of neglect. Carl Bridenbaugh’s classic study Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (New York: Ronald Press, 1938) remains a very useful starting point for understanding how colonial city dwellers dealt with fire. No one who writes about fire can ignore Stephen J. Pyne’s conceptual work Fire: A Brief History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001). Although its heavily illustrated format might suggest otherwise, Donald J. Cannon’s Heritage of Flames: The Illustrated History of Early American Firefighting (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977) is well researched and very useful. Elizabeth Gray Kogen Spera’s “Building for Business: The Impact of Commerce on the City Plan and Architecture of the City of Philadelphia, 1750–1800” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1980) has provided a number of historians with insights about the function of fire insurance in shaping eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Nicholas B. Wainwright’s A Philadelphia Story: The Philadelphia ContributionshipfortheInsuranceofHousesfromLossbyFire (Philadelphia:Contributionship,1952) is also very informative on the early history of insurance in Philadelphia. Forunderstandinghowdifferentsocialandpoliticalsystemsshapedfirefightinginthe Atlantic World, I am grateful to my former student Daniel Winer. His PhD dissertation, “The Development and Meaning of Firefighting, 1650–1850” (University of Delaware, 2009), is now available to other researchers. Jill Lepore’s New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery ,andConspiracyinanEighteenth-CenturyManhattan(NewYork:AlfredA.Knopf,2005) is a thought-provoking study of the cultural power of fire in early America. The theme of insurance and moral hazard is first introduced in the fire chapter. For a clear explanation ofthechangingmeaningofthetermseeTomBaker,“OntheGenealogyofMoralHazard,” Texas Law Review 75 (1996): 237–92. Aswithfire,Ihavealsoturnedtoanolderliteraturefromthehistoryofmedicinetotell the smallpox story, as well as to a handful of new semipopular works. On smallpox, begin with John B. Blake, Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630–1822 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); and John B. Blake, “The Inoculation Controversy in...