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9780814713464

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A provocative and illuminating collection --Publishers Weekly

<p> Covering disasters both natural (hurricanes in colonial America, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) and mechanical (the Challenger explosion, Chicago's deadly 1977 el train crash), these essays use contemporary media and political responses to explicate the cultural ramifications of the events. Novels published after the great Chicago fire of 1871 emphasized how the fire was both a punishment for the city's sins and also the inscrutable workings of a divine hand to make Chicago a more perfect physical city. Feminist writings used the chivalry of male passengers in the 1912 Titanic sinking to criticize 'the failure of men to protect women and children on shore, ' while African-Americans' view of it as a 'white disaster' generated a large body of populist poems and songs that celebrated the absence of black victims . Biel has assembled a provocative and illuminating collection.

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Steven Biel is Director of Studies in History and Literature at Harvard University, and the author of Down With the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster.

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