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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood by Cynthia A. Kierner Jamin Wells (bio) Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood cynthia a. kierner University of North Carolina Press, 2019 286 pp. Disasters are hard to avoid these days. Accounts of environmental, political, social, and technological (to name just a few) catastrophes inundate our newsfeeds with stories and images of suffering, loss, and death. Though each disaster is situated in a unique time and place, every disaster's narrative seems to follow a familiar arc. The earliest reports provide quantitative data and scientific analysis. Human interest stories about the victims and villains are then followed by accounts of rescue, resilience, and the inevitable postdisaster investigations charged with ascertaining causes and identifying interventions. Along the way, disasters as varied as warehouse fires, hurricanes, mass shootings, and global pandemics become Rorschach tests on cultural and political tensions, fueling debate and, on occasion, action. Until, that is, the next disaster captures the news cycle, and the story begins anew. Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood, Cynthia A. Kierner's sweeping new synthesis, traces the origins of these shared ideas and attitudes about the causes, consequences, and meanings of calamity in "our own disaster-ridden times" (xii). This was not the book Kierner, a noted historian of early America, set out to write. Searching for "a case study of an early American disaster, which would tell a good story in the service of reconstructing the culture and experiences of a colonial community," Kierner failed to find any "true 'disasters' in the modern sense" (xi–xii). Not only was the very term disaster rarely used, but calamities were not significant topics for public discourse. Even more, the idea that disasters were processes that people could understand, explain, and mitigate was not central to the early American experience. Nor was the notion that society had the ability and responsibility to relieve suffering and prevent future disasters. So Kierner pivoted. Instead of a focused case study, Inventing Disaster is a three-hundred-year "cultural history of the idea of disaster and of responses to calamities" in the British Atlantic (2). [End Page 308] This book could not have come at a better time. We are in a golden age of disaster history as scholars across the disciplinary spectrum mine the cauldron of calamity. Some, like Andy Horowitz in the 2021 Bancroft Prize cowinner, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Harvard UP, 2020), focus on a particular disaster, exploring calamities as contested processes, which, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, had roots in a century of social, cultural, political, technological, and environmental entanglements. Others, like Kevin Rozario in The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America (U of Chicago P, 2007), take a broader approach that foregrounds the evolving place and varied impacts of disasters on culture and society. Inventing Disaster is deeply situated in the existing scholarship. It combines the nuance of the case study with the wider perspectives that are hallmarks of macro-level histories to offer "a prequel to existing cultural histories and case studies of iconic American disasters" (9). Kierner argues the modern culture of calamity gradually emerged over three centuries as three "interrelated developments that scholars associate with modernity" reshaped how the British Atlantic thought about and responded to disasters (3). Drawing on a broad range of archival and published material, including newspapers, periodicals, correspondence, and visual images, as well as many previously published studies, Inventing Disaster shows how increased access to information, faith in science and human agency, and the rising power of sensibility to drive benevolence—"science, sentiment, and information," as Kierner summarizes—turned unheralded devastation into sensational disasters (210). If the larger thesis paints a familiar picture of the foundational changes wrought by the Enlightenment, Inventing Disaster's deft balancing of focused case studies situated in a robust framework attuned to the nuances of place, continuity, and change provides a model for an accessible, scholarly cultural history. This story is told over six chapters. The first four examine the colonial, transatlantic origins of the...