Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood by Cynthia A. Kierner (review)

In Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood, Cynthia A. Kierner argues that our modern relationship to disasters—the way we understand their causes, how we provide relief to their victims, and our desire to try and prevent them—is just that, modern. Kierner's central thesis is that we have arrived at our contemporary culture of disaster through the revolution in analytical thought known as the Enlightenment. For scholars of history versed in the eighteenth-century development of the natural sciences, this thesis is not controversial. However, what this book does so fantastically, through firsthand accounts of disasters, the pronouncements of religious leaders, and contemporary newspapers, is chart the evolution of this culture.

Kierner is very effective throughout this book at characterizing how disasters were understood in the Western world at various points in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and thus the book becomes an invaluable tool for scholars undertaking research into disasters in different Western societies more broadly. Kierner's work shows how one can avoid making anachronistic judgments about how people responded, or rather how they often did not respond, to disasters. This contribution is made clear when, in the first chapter, she argues against existing characterizations of Jamestown's early settlers as lazy for their limited response to famine and disease. To the colonists, these events were providential in nature, and they could have had little hope of resisting them.

Whereas disasters had once been interpreted primarily as providential in origin and understood by religious leaders as punishments for moral failings, Kierner, through examining in the second chapter the emergence of shipwreck accounts as a popular literary subgenre in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, shows how this interpretation began to change. Convincingly, Kierner shows how seafaring audiences, as a distinct readership, encouraged increasingly technical descriptions of these events and how this genre's biblical rhetoric increasingly turned from stern moralizing to eliciting sympathy for the victims of shipwrecks.

While Kierner is often able to provide fascinating insights by covering topics, such as shipwrecks, that are rarely explored, she is also more than able to provide similar insights when considering events that have been written about more extensively. For example, when looking at the Lisbon, Portugal, earthquake of 1755, which features heavily in the third chapter of the book, Kierner shows the wider implications of the disaster across the Atlantic and how it encouraged nascent scientific study of earthquakes. Though mentioned, it seems strange that Kierner has not more extensively examined the ideas underpinning the Marquis of Pombal's rebuilding of Lisbon, as it seems that his desire to make Lisbon earthquake-proof represented a decisive change from earlier providential views of disasters as events that could not be averted.

In later chapters, cyclones, floods, and other rapid-onset disasters are considered alongside those more definitively human in origin, such as steamboat explosions. This book can feel a little disjointed in places because Kierner does not examine one type of disaster. However, she retains a strong focus on disaster culture that largely mitigates the broad scope of the disasters considered in this book. In sum, Inventing Disaster provides a very effective and vital summation of the development of the primarily American culture of disaster; important comparisons are made with British responses to disaster and approaches to relief, but they are not a sustained point of focus. The book also highlights the contribution historians can make to a topic often considered outside their disciplinary purview.