Great Fire Research Articles

The Nation's Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West by James R. Skillen

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 3 the Forest Service (let aloneAmerica),it is true enough that the fire did facilitate the passage of this legislation. Still, Egan’s summary of the Weeks Act is incomplete and symptomatic of his failure to reckon fully with the most important consequence of the fire, which far from savingAmerica probably did the country damage over the long run. For a more convincing assessment of the fire’s legacy, serious readers will want to consult Stephen Pyne’s Year of the Fires:The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (Viking, 2001).Pyne,a historian who knows more about fire than anyone else,points out that one of the key provisions of the Weeks Act, ignored by Egan, allowed for the federal government to provide grants to states to promote fire protection .This established a framework for the Forest Service to develop a massive agenda for fire suppression over the next several decades. The problem,as Pyne and other fire historians have made clear, is that excluding fire from forests has made the forests vulnerable to disease and created massive fuel build up, thus enhancing the conditions for conflagrations. Egan is aware of Pyne’s larger argument and attempts to take it into account,quoting Pyne’s conclusion that“the Great Fires of 1910 shaped the American fire landscape more than any other fire in any year throughout the twentieth century” (p. 273). Still, in an effort to preserve a heroic image of Roosevelt and Pinchot, Egan takes pains to separate the Forest Service’s commitment to fire suppression from TR’s and Pinchot’s original vision of conservation. Egan acknowledges that Pinchot “considered fire prevention to be a job of the service” but makes a distinction between “firefighting as an idea” for Pinchot and a “raison d’être,” as it was for others like William Greeley, Chief Forester in the 1920s (p. 270). This distinction is unconvincing. Egan himself notes that in promoting conservation, Pinchot “professed that wildfire was akin to slavery — a blight on the young country but something that could be wiped out by man”and that it was not until the 1930sthatPinchotrethoughtthese views(p.52). In the end, The Big Burn is informative and highly readable, though its narrative appeal comes at the expense of analytical nuance. A story of TR and Pinchot as crusading heroes whose agenda finds redemption through tragedynotonlyhastowritearoundtheevidence ,it also has to ignore a substantial body of scholarship that treats conservation, fire, the Progressive movement, and Roosevelt himself in a far more complicated way than takes place here. Jeffrey Ostler University of Oregon The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West by James R. Skillen University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2009. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. 320 pages. $39.95 cloth. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has had a complex and turbulent history since its creation in 1946 out of the General Land Office and U.S. Grazing Service. James Skillen’s The Nation’s Largest Landlord is the first comprehensive and analytical history of the BLM.The agency, the largest land manager in the United States, oversees 256 million acres, covering grazing, minerals, timber, wilderness, fish and wildlife, and recreation activities. The BLM had its main roots in the General Land Office, the federal agency that oversaw the dispersal of much of the public domain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Great ambiguity marked the BLM’s early history as the agency attempted to deal with the inherited issues surrounding property rights, federalism, and environmentalism. It had an often conflicting mandate to encourage natural resources developmentwhileprotectingthepublicinterestand encouraging recreation on public lands. To make sense of the BLM’s history, the authorfocuseshisnarrativeontwooverlapping  Reviews questions: what were the evolving purposes and goals of public land administration, and what was the decision-making process for determining those goals and purposes? Skillen divides his study into three main periods. During the first era, 1946 to 1970, the agency was dominated by resource interests bent on controlling the grazing, timber, and mineral development of public lands, while the agency sought to exert professional management based on a U.S. Forest Service model. In the second period...

Identity, Nationalism, and Irish Traditional Music in Chicago, 1867–1900

On the evening of October 8,1871, the family of fiddler Pat McLaughlin and his wife gathered for a celebration at 137 De Koven Street. The cousin of McLaugh lin's wife had just arrived from Ireland, coming to the United States for the first time. McLaughlin cheerfully provided his instrument to initiate a party that he hoped none would forget, playing music for a dance held in his visiting relative's honor. As it happened, the occasion proved a memorable event, but not because the guests danced exuberantly to the strains of melodies culled from home. The dance was instead interrupted by massive walls of flame at around nine o'clock that night. Chicago's Great Fire of 1871, which destroyed two-thirds of the starting with McLauglin's street, cut the festivities short. McLaughlin's neigh borhood was not merely leveled by the blaze, but was in fact the initial site of the Great Fire's combustion.1 McLaughlin's dance encapsulates two contending forces in the lives of Irish traditional musicians. One was the desire to transplant the art of tradi tional music brought from their home country through continued perfor mance in Chicago. A force was the reality of overwhelming social change. Life in the urban United States was not the same as existence in rural Ireland, where a devastating citywide inferno would have been unthinkable. While traditional musicians in Ireland could usually count on an audience, as practitioners in the second city often found it difficult to attract attention, the majority of the Irish in Chicago were uninterested, or only casually inter ested, in traditional arts. Most of the city's Irish population advocated assim ilation through the creation of a new ethnic American identity that was based on Catholicism, nationalism, and invented celebrations of Irish heritage?

Thomas Soane's buildings near Billingsgate, London, 1640–66

Excavations at Billingsgate in the City of London in 1982 uncovered extensive remains of the 17th-century buildings of Botolph Wharf. Changes to the structures, and an exceptionally rich array of artefacts datable to 1620–66 (the Great Fire of London), are attributable to the tenancy of Thomas Soane, grocer, and later of his widow. The artefacts and buildings demonstrate differing domestic and warehouse uses just before the Fire, and complement the documentary record. When taken with plan evidence from the Treswell surveys of c. 1612, the excavations prompt discussion of how warehouses fitted into the configuration of buildings in the pre-Fire City.

The Great Fire of London

This literacy unit of work links with a History topic based on the Great Fire of London and uses fictional texts about firemen and emergency services.

The Monument Project (Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice)

This paper describes the concepts, ideas, background and operations of The Monument Project (Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice), a digital video installation that produces a continuous stream of weather-responsive panoramic images from the top of the Monument in the City of London. The work, which was commissioned by Julian Harrap Architects, was part of a £4.5 million refurbishment of the 17th-century landmark, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Dr. Robert Hooke to commemorate the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Before and after the Great Earthquake and Fire: Early Films of San Francisco, 1897-1916, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/papr/sfhome.html. Created and maintained by the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Reviewed June 30-July 1, 2008

This Web site, part of the American Memory project, presents twenty-six films of the San Francisco Bay area taken before and after the earthquake of April 18, 1906, and the four-day fire that destroyed the heart of the city. Web Site Reviews 635 The site provides a very brief introduction to the topic, focused mostly on comparisons with other cities. Each film, however, includes an extensive and usually excellent scene-by-scene summary, including a description of the views presented and sometimes additional information—both general and specific—on the events shown in the film. The summaries include only a few errors, e.g., a reference to the “International Workers of the World.” Only very few of the generalizations can be questioned. For the most part, though, the summaries rarely venture beyond description. The films are presented alphabetically by title, not chronologically. One must read the individual summaries to determine a film's date and how...

Netzwerke - der Weimarer Notfallverbund der Kultureinrichtungen

As a result of the catastrophic flooding on the Elbe and Mulde rivers in the summer of 2002, in which numerous cultural treasures were destroyed, the cultural institutions of Weimar began to consider ways to improve damage prevention, cooperation with emergency services, and ways to rescue and care for damaged cultural artifacts. Even before the great fire at the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, the formation of an emergency network among the cultural institutions had been decided upon. The experts in these institutions now hold emergency practice drills and are prepared to join forces through a pre-established alarm system and work together under the leadership of the affected institution to master any crisis that might arise. On February 6, 2007 , the city of Weimar, the Classics Foundation Weimar and representatives of cultural organizations within the state of Thuringia signed an administrative agreement in Weimar which will govern the management of staffing and material resources for mutual assistance in the case of an emergency.

Experiments on Mixotrophic Protists and Catastrophic Darkness

Catastrophically darkened photic zone conditions in water bodies are postulated to be induced by a diversity of mechanisms that are recorded in the geological record, including asteroid and comet impacts and large-scale volcanic eruptions. Giant wildfires, such as those that followed the great fires in Siberia in 1915, have been directly shown to cause large reductions in sunlight penetrating to the ground. Previous studies on the response of phototrophs to sudden prolonged darkness have focused on the survival of axenic strains. In this paper, we describe laboratory experiments to investigate the survival and growth of isolated and mixed cultures of freshwater and marine mixotrophs after 6 months of darkness and in the low light that would follow these events. Mixotrophs could survive 6 months of darkness. Some species used dissolved organic carbon, which can be released from dead biomass after loss of light and was shown to improve feeding rates. Mixotrophs also improved the survival and subsequent growth of obligate phototrophs at low light levels when grown in mixed cultures. The ability of mixotrophs to switch from photosynthesis to heterotrophy following sudden darkening would not only allow them to survive but to grow and contribute to active food chains. The experiments suggest that, following the return of light, resumption of photosynthesis can be rapid. These experiments improve our understanding of the collapse of photosynthesis following catastrophic darkening and emphasize the important role of mixotrophy in the resilience of the photosynthetic biosphere during such periods. We speculate on the implications for the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact event and periods of global freezing.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Between Revolutions: Re‐Appraising the Restoration in Britain

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Between Revolutions: Re‐Appraising the Restoration in Britain

History Writing That’s “Good to Think With”: The Great Fire, Blizzard! and An American Plague

In this article I argue that history books that are “good to think with” narrate history and, at the same time, provide insight into how it is constructed. These books are much more than collections of facts. Specifically, they provide information about historical context, multiple perspectives, sources of information, and original interpretation. This is crucial information for anyone attempting to understand history. As examples, I show how three books by Jim Murphy—The Great Fire, Blizzard! and An American Plague—address each of these essential topics.

The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren (review)

Reviewed by: The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren Nigel Yates The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren. By Paul Jeffery. (New York: Hambledon Continuum. 2007. Pp. xx, 385. $35.95. ISBN 978-1-852-85142-2.) This is a paperback reprint of a book first published in 1996; its author died within a year of its original publication. It is a meticulous account of the subject, with 188 well-chosen illustrations in the form of plans, engravings, and photographs. Particularly valuable for the church historian are those illustrations that show the interiors of some churches before Victorian restoration. The book is divided into two roughly equal parts. The first part provides a general introduction to Wren’s city churches, the second a detailed account of the fifty-eight churches plus St. Paul’s Cathedral (the cathedral and fifty-one of the churches were rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666), including those that are no longer standing. For the historian of London or architecture, this is an exceptionally useful and detailed book. A major problem with these churches is distinguishing those designed by Wren from those designed by his assistants, notably Nicholas Hawksmoor and Robert Hooke. Paul Jeffery unravels this problem with great skill. Where he is less comprehensive is in his discussion of the buildings’ original furnishings and the alteration of these in nineteenth-century restorations. Unusually, most of the churches were designed without thought to the furnishings, which were then commissioned from local craftsmen. It is therefore impossible to say much about the original liturgical focus of the buildings. Jeffery assumes that most pulpits and reading desks were placed in the traditional early-seventeenth-century position, more or less adjacent to the altar, and that they were only moved into the middle of churches in the mid-eighteenth century (pp. 156–57), but cites no evidence to support this assumption. The likelihood is that pulpit and reading desk were placed in different locations in different buildings, according to the wishes of those commissioning the furnishings; for those churches in which the pulpit and reading desk are known to have been in a central position by the mid-eighteenth century this may have been their position from the start. [End Page 392] Inevitably, there is some discussion of the long-term future of Wren’s surviving city churches, with only twenty-three of the fifty-one rebuildings still surviving as complete entities. The various attempted solutions, such as the creation of guild churches in 1952 and the recommendations of commissions under Sir Denys Buckley in 1970 and Lord Templeman in 1994, are carefully evaluated, and Jeffery’s conclusion is that no hasty or ill-considered actions should be taken in the future. Within the text there are a small number of omissions or curious comments. The one on page 158 that “services of holy communion (not then referred to as ‘mass’ due to association with Catholicism) were less frequent than nowadays” seems out of place in a work of this scholarship. The comment on the sale of fittings from St. Antholin’s in 1874 (p. 208) might have been expanded to list their new owners; some are still in the parish church of King Charles the Martyr, Tunbridge Wells. The early-twentieth-century Anglo-Catholic embellishment of the parish and pilgrimage church of St. Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge, is not noted (p. 259), although the late-twentieth-century reordering of the parish church of St. Stephen Walbrook is (p. 342).These minor inconsistencies and infelicities do not, however, detract from the overall value of this first-class work of reference, and the publishers are to be congratulated for reprinting this book. Nigel Yates University of Wales, Lampeter Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press

San Francisco Knows What Kids–and Their Parents–Want

San Francisco Knows What Kids–and Their Parents–Want

The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange by Joseph Monteyne

237 JOSEPH MONTEYNE. The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xvi ⫹286. $124.95. ‘‘Early Modern’’ in the title must be understood to mean that The Printed Image in Early Modern London examines printed images at one brief period in that epoch and not across the entire age: the book concentrates on London during the Restoration. Methodologically fresh and theoretically informed, it complements Anthony Griffith’s Print in Stuart Britain and Sheila O’Connell’s Popular Print in England 1550–1850 (not mentioned), as well as my own work on ephemeral images of transient people. It espouses prints created for what I would call a mass audience; the less expensive printed objects that ‘‘decorated coffee-houses and taverns’’ were ‘‘used’’ rather than ‘‘collected.’’ These images are distinct from those created for elite collectors and popular viewers —Hogarth’s Invasion: France and England was aimed at a mass audience, but his Harlot’s Progress was done for both elite and popular classes, two groups that are quite different but not easy to separate because they share some tastes and proclivities, but not others . More needs to be thought about the distinction between elite, popular, and mass consumers of graphic art. Though sometimes jargonistic, The Printed Image is sharply focused, examining how ‘‘appropriations and representations of space negotiated the boundaries of the social and political world of early modern Londoners, challenging an older subjectivity and more traditional forms of order that the restoration of monarchical rule struggled to reassert.’’ It looks at how prints depicted and propagandized threats to the flow of life in restoration London; Mr. Monteyne ’s book views images as interventions , polemics, reflections on, and politicized statements about, events from the apocalyptic to the festive. Though disruptive, some effects were cataclysmic ; others, carnivalesque or festive. The exception is the so-called ‘‘solemn mock progression of the pope,’’ in which an effigy of the pontiff, after being carried through the streets of the city, was ceremonially burned in a bonfire . More congruent with coffee houses, this event does not fit with the Great Fire, the Great Plague, and Frost Fair. Though carnivalesque, the evidence of its importance and even its occurrence (as Roger North describes it) is not entirely convincing. But this is a small matter in a book otherwise rich and rewarding . At the apocalyptic end of the spectrum of events, Mr. Monteyne looks at how images published in London represented the bubonic plague of 1665. His interest is chiefly in broadsides, such as John Dunstall and John Sellers’s Scenes of the Plague in London with Statistical Breakdown by Parish for the Years 1625, 1636, and 1665. Sheets like this are examples of a distinctive seventeenth -century genre providing an account of the city and the social practices of its inhabitants; they invite an examination of the link between print culture and urban movements and spaces as the social order broke down. But Mr. Monteyne examines the title pages and also the texts of Thomas Dekker’s A Rod for Run-awayes and Henry Petowe ’s The Countrie Ague: or London her Welcome Home to her Retired Chil- 238 dren. To definitively explore the most vital of contemporary issues raised by the plague, he unearths matters not fully broached before, scrutinizing, in depth, flight from and return to the city, the treatment of removed Londoners in the country, and the establishment and function of pesthouses. Writing about an equally apocalyptic event, Mr. Monteyne looks at how the London fire of 1666 threatened the identity and autonomy of the city and how this threat was mapped literally in contemporary cartography. After treating paintings of the city in flames by AngloDutch artists, he devotes most energy to maps of London by Wenceslaus Hollar and others. The Great Fire, like the Great Plague, created conflicts between the city center and its periphery that were visibly reflected in the art and literature . Prints and maps of the fire, which contrasted the glorious ‘‘before’’ with the dreadful ‘‘after,’’ ‘‘generated new visual conceptions of the city and urban space that foreshadowed the disappearance of an older London.’’ As well as foreshadowing, these widely...

History, Memory, and Identity in Modern Singapore: Testimonies from the Urban Margins

In 2006–2007, I interviewed elderly Singaporeans on their experiences of resettlement from an urban kampong (village) to emergency public housing after a great fire in 1961. I learned much about the lives of semiautonomous dwellers in an unauthorized settlement and the individual and social transformation following their rehousing. My informants also highlighted what the experiences meant to them and their identity in a modern city-state. This paper treats the testimonies as both source and social memory and seeks to avoid the essentialism into which many social historians, oral history practitioners, and memory scholars have fallen in their approach toward the craft. As a source of social history, when used in conjunction with other historical sources, the reminiscences are patently useful for understanding the role of public housing in transforming a marginal population into an integrated citizenry. This enables the writing of a new social history of postwar Singapore that departs from the discursive official accounts of urban kampong life and of the 1961 inferno. At the same time, the oral history also underlines powerful social and political influences on individual memory, being marked by nostalgia for the kampong and ambivalence toward the imagined character of younger Singaporeans. Statements on the rumors of government-inspired arson in the 1961 calamity, however, constitute a significant countermyth in contemporary society, revealing a more critical side to the social memory.

Burial at the site of the parish church of St Benet Sherehog before and after the Great Fire. Excavations at 1 Poultry, City of London. A. Miles, W. White & D. Tankard. MoLAS Monograph 39. Museum of London Archaeological Service publications, London, 2008. 114 pp. ISBN 13: 978 1 901992 75 5

Burial at the site of the parish church of St Benet Sherehog before and after the Great Fire. Excavations at 1 Poultry, City of London. A. Miles, W. White & D. Tankard. MoLAS Monograph 39. Museum of London Archaeological Service publications, London, 2008. 114 pp. ISBN 13: 978 1 901992 75 5

The Monument to The Great Fire of London

At the very top of the 202-ft-high Monument to the Great Fire of London, c. 1677, a substantial armature secures the gilded copper flaming orb down to the Portland stonework of the column. During the 2007–09 Monument major repair contract, the armature was found to be tilting over, crushing stonework and causing concern over the stability of the flaming orb. The general movement of the Monument over the years is discussed here together with the specific movement of the armature and consequent damage to the historic fabric. Reasons for the tilting are offered along with a description of the approach taken to resist further movement until the next inspection of the exterior in about 80 years' time, the average frequency of scaffolding the Monument.

'A Great Fire Came to Be Kindled:' Unspinning Mr. Philbrick's Mayflower

Claims about the economic motivations of population groups in the American past are a staple of contemporary political argument, as polemicists of one side seek to impeach the moral standing of the other side by impeaching the moral standing of the forebears of the people on the other side. Sometimes such polemics are presented to the public in the guise of nonpartisan works of popular history. This paper, applying the training of a litigator in preparing an opposition or reply brief, examines and exposes the spin in the economic history offered by popular author Nathaniel Philbrick in his 207 book Mayflower, in the sections of the book addressing the bloody conflict in New England in 1675-76 known as King Philip's War. The paper uses the facts Mr. Philbrick himself reports in his book to refute his conclusions, showing that the English colonists fought in legitimate self-defense and not out of greed or racism, against certain (not all) Indian tribes whose warriors, in the words of one of their own chiefs, were like sticks laid on a heap, till by the multitude of them a great fire came to be kindled.

:London: An Architectural History

This comprehensive overview of London's buildings encompasses the entire history of the city's architecture, from the time of the Romans to the twenty-first century. The book traces the many factors that have influenced the work of architects and builders over the centuries and examines virtually every kind of building, from palaces to terraced houses, shops to railway stations, and bridges to churches. Extensively illustrated, the book will delight readers with a particular interest in London and its architecture as well as those who are curious about metropolitan architecture in general. Setting the city's architecture in various contexts, the book delves into such intriguing topics as the impact of the Thames River on surrounding buildings, how the Great Fire of 1666 affected the rebuilding of churches, why air pollution and weather led to a cold official style of architecture, the arrival in the 1920s of major foreign architects, Prince Charles' 'vision of Britain', and whether London architecture can be said to have a distinct character.

Vantage Points in the Seventeenth-century City

Late twentieth-century social and linguistic theory tells us that the view from the tall building transforms us into analysts and historians, disembodied readers of the civic 'text'. This paper argues that the proposition would have been familiar to seventeenth-century City-dwellers, and does so by pursuing the experience of the elevated observer, or rather, how that experience was depicted, in pictures and words. A great deal of ingenuity, as well as money, was invested in building high after the Great Fire of 1666; a decade later, the anxieties surrounding the prospect of a Catholic royal succession began to prompt some peculiarly forceful anticipations of that modern theoretical construction, the uniquely 'advantaged' spectator.

Anachronism, Ekphrasis and the ‘Shape of Time’ in *The Great Fire*

Anachronism, Ekphrasis and the ‘Shape of Time’ in *The Great Fire*