January 2014 – Page 4 – American Disasters

January 23, 2014December 16, 2020

State of Emergency: An uneasy, but intriguing call to disaster awareness

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Disasters can both be sparked by mankind or the natural processes of our mother earth, however the cohesion between the two separate have lead to unimaginable interactions. I was moved by Mel Chin’s movie of animated illustrations, as it described two events in history sharing the same calendar date of September 11, however separated by 38 years, 1973-2011. Both of the instances are revered as disasters, 9-11-2011, being an attack on America by the terrorist group known as Al-Qaeda and the second, 9-11-1973, being the coup de’ taut backed by the US in which democratically elected government of Salvador Allende seated in Santiago, Chile was forcibly removed from power. It is interesting that two of the most noticeable relationships between the two are the calendar date of each and the rough estimate of life loss. I took away from this short animated film, history is inclined to repeat itself and the date 9-11 is remembered by both Chile and the USA for completely different reasons, however the United States is a player that had a hand in both events.

As I walked around the room another two pieces of art, produced by Kate Kretz, caught my attention. Kretz carefully illustrated two scenes of tornadoes on the end of a spoon tarnished by nothing touching down in the heartland of rural America. She used the most impressive technique of silver pointing on silverware that had tarnished, which is caused by natural exposure to air and moisture. In checking the credentials of Kate Kretz, we learn she is an American artist born in Grove City, PA and was raised in Binghamton, which is located in update New York. After little research in can be noted there have been tornadoes in Binghamton, NY within the last twenty years and the area has had historical accounts of tornadoes touching down dating even further back. Even more evidence to the fact Kretz was exposed to tornadoes growing up can be found in her own quotations at http://www.snyderman-works.com/artists/kate-kretz. In her short testimony as to why she constructs images of impeding catastrophic tornadoes, Kretz notes that, “Emotion is internal weather. Growing up in a highly dysfunctional family, tornadoes in my dreams have always felt like signals of impending doom, hovering on the horizon, a reminder to brace one’s self against the next disaster. Floods feel like overwhelming sorrow.” A point, unnoticed by me when examining these spoons, is Kretz placed these illustrations on common tools for ingestion because she hopes to convey the idea that situations and emotions associated with disasters must sometimes be swallowed because that is our role as human beings. In both of her pieces at the exhibit the overwhelming focal point is the tornado itself, making the surrounding setting seem minuscule. The path of a tornado is almost unpredictable, which means all that lays in its path will be altered by the natural destructive forces of a tornado. A point that should be noted is there were no works by Kretz in the exhibit depicting floods, but a number of her other pieces use flood waters as the focal point.

The State of Emergency exhibit brought together the human element and the recurring uneasiness brought on by disaster. In Chin’s animated film we saw how attacks against humanity by other humans can create different opinions when the role of aggressor and target are swapped in two different disasters. The works by Kate Kretz teach people the duties of humanity even though sometimes they may be hard to swallow.

Here is the url address to Mel Chin’s website for his movie…

http://www.911-911movie.com

January 23, 2014December 16, 2020

Emotional Cognizance: Finding a Balance between Empathy and Distance when Discussing Disasters

As I am from metropolitan Atlanta, I was drawn to Katherine Taylor’s three part series, Atlanta Flooding. I was struck by the fact that I did not remember the flood at all. The VAC’s description notes that the heavy rains that caused the flood in Atlanta in 2009 also affected Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas, but I suppose because I was not aversely impacted, I didn’t make the effort to commit the event to memory.

The first thing I felt when looking at these painting was guilt. I felt guilty that I couldn’t remember an event that apparently caused culvert failure, school closings, and homes to be destroyed less than thirty minutes away from my home. Floods are topics of historic, biblical, and often cultural import, but with modern technology, they are now localized. Unless a flood garners a wide media following, it will rarely cause an outside party to think twice on it. I decided to do research on other floods in my area once I got back to my room, and did not feel guilty that I could not remember other natural disasters. I think the difference between my two reactions was that one event was depicted visually and the others in writing. Visual appeals to emotions can often be more effective at swaying an individual’s opinion than written appeals to reason (this is a crass oversimplification of a complex psychological issue, and there are many exceptions to this notion, but for the sake of space I’ll leave it here).

Why is this significant, and how can students of history benefit from an understanding of this idea? In order to be an informed global citizen, students should recognize the types of appeals texts make. Political cartoons, photographs, and films often inspire more intense reactions than academic dissertations, pamphlets, and news articles. They can lead to riots and play instrumental parts in revolutions. To know that emotion plays a key part in historical events is to be one step closer to understanding those events. In this sense, introspection and empathy are useful. However, too much empathy can lead to bias. For example, when a student is selecting sources to use in a paper, he should keep his own reaction to a text in mind. As Eli pointed out, historians often need to distance themselves emotionally from their topics in order to present a fair and accurate depiction. That’s not to say art should not be used as a source, but that it should be used with the understanding that it can sway a writer or reader without their knowledge.

Were I to write a paper on recent southern floods, I would have to consider the guilt I felt when looking on Atlanta Flooding when deciding whether or not to use it as a source. According to the VAC description, the artist combines colors, painting and drawing techniques, and stains on the paper to illustrate her point that floods are “contradictory” and “distorted.” I could use that analysis to my advantage were I to write a paper on the confusing and distorting effects of floods on southerners, or I could combine this series with other texts in order to make the point that while some southerners think floods are contradictory and distorting, they aren’t as disruptive as they appear. The quality would depend on my own conscientiousness as a writer and on my ability to incorporate other texts effectively. Toeing the line between empathy and emotional distance in a class on disasters will be a challenge this semester, but with this assignment as an introduction, I think it will prove to be a very manageable one.

January 23, 2014December 16, 2020

Art and history: an experiential bridge

I visited the State of Emergency exhibit a few minutes ago, and it was very interesting. I thought that the exhibit with the legal pads inscribed with lines which were actually tiny lines of text was fascinating, as was the exhibit on fracking.

The piece that spoke to me the most was the on e entitled “London 1940, Bloomsbury, Clerkenwell, Southwark, Waterloo.” Here, the artist used pages of a book that takes place in World War 2 London, and then built a replica of some of London neighborhoods out of that paper. He then burnt the paper in order to show the devastation of the bombings, using maps of London that had data on where bombs had fallen and the destruction that they had caused.

It is one thing to read about the bombing of a city, and to learn the number of bombs dropped, their explosive power in megatons of TNT, the number of deaths, the cost of the damage, the historic sites which were destroyed, or the other endless statistics. A story might do such a situation more justice, and I think that is what Kurt Vonnegut attempted to do in Slaughterhouse Five, where Billy Pilgrim wheels dead bodies into piles in the streets of Dresden after spending the night in the basement of a slaughterhouse.

Yet, neither literary nor historical works capture the visceral nature of something like a disaster in the same way that artwork can. Seeing the model of London laid out, I could see the empty spaces where walls and buildings had been, and it felt much more real than ever before, even though I knew previously that London had been ravaged by German bombing. It’s probably something that you can’t understand unless you’ve been there; but I felt closer to it than I did before. I tried to imagine what it was like to have that burn, that bomb, break down that wall across the street, or to walk down a street and see through to the next one, or the one after that, because the buildings in between had been leveled. I thought about what the smoldering edges of burnt paper looked like when the artist was working, and what the wreckage of destroyed buildings looked like after the bombs detonated. Viewing this piece, it made the whole city feel awfully fragile; likely no more fragile than the residents of London felt their homes were when the bombs tore through walls and leveled sturdy buildings.

The decision to use paper on which a story taking place in wartime London was brilliant. The lives and stories which existed on the paper are untold, as were the stories that were cut short or drastically changed by World War Two.

History is so often an examination of human lives and experiences in an unemotional way. This intellectualization is, of course, useful. By distancing ourselves, we can think well about the situation, and therefore, about future situations. If we truly felt the horror of most disasters, we could likely never process enough to contemplate what we could do to avert future possible similar disasters. Yet, part of understanding a disaster (or any situation) is understanding what it felt like to be there. Art has the ability to connect us in a way that academic literature cannot, in a way that even talented fiction writers often do not achieve. “London 1940” is a great example of this: it connected me, at an emotional, visceral, real level with the destruction of London, and helped me to see a sliver of a disaster through which I did not live, but which I would certainly like to understand.

January 22, 2014December 16, 2020

Defining the “Gilded Age”

Although I like what the small amount of Urban History that I’ve studied, I think James Connolly has the weakest argument from the three readings. I didn’t see anything more than theories until he finally used the example of the role of the Irish-Catholics in the twin cities and how they affected the history of the two cities differently. I also come from the predisposition that Urban History tends to study more effect than cause.

Both Edwards and Schneirov, I believe, have stronger arguments than Connolly. I like that Schneirov combines the social, political, and capital effects on the history of the time, and I think he properly addresses areas of cause and affect that are essential to studying the time period, and he states that his opinion on what the period encompasses is just that, an opinion. I especially like how he emphasizes the importance of capitalism during this time; neither of the other two talk in as great of detail about it as he does. Unlike ajpignone, the jury is still out for me on whether or not Edwards ideas of including the Gilded Age with the Progressive Era. I will definitely have to research further on this specific argument to make my decision, but I think that she has a very strong argument. She gives multiple examples of progression during the Gilded Age. My predisposition to the time period is that it should be distinct from the Progressive Era, so the strength or weakness of the argument does not correlate with how I originally felt on the subject, unlike how I felt about Connolly’s essay.

January 22, 2014December 16, 2020

Its More Distinctive Than Some Think

Like Elcaldwell mentioned, all three articles read examine the ways in which we analysis/categorize history and the lenses through which we examine it. Rebecca Edwards, of Vassar College, passionately contributes to the thoughtful discussion that we have been having as a class about whether the label of “Gilded Age” is appropriate and just for what actually happened during the time period we are discussing. In the editor’s note of the “Forum: Should we abolish the ‘Gilded Age’”, she argues, as many in our class stated, that the most prominent Gilded Age stereotypes and historical assumptions do not rightly characterize the era. To wit, she “draws on the political trends and movements and policy innovations of those decades” and uproots the influences of other popular events like the Populist Party, the American Farmer’s Alliance, the Interstate Commerce Act, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and muckraking journalism.

Edwards’ argument regarding historicization of the Gilded Age is one of strength and valid historical backing, and I don’t seek to reject her interpretation out of hand; but, I disagree with her determination to abolish the Gilded Age as a separate period. As the editor’s note explains, her stance is part of a wider, more recent trend toward examining 1870-1920 as a single, unique period and possibly coining it the “long progressive era.” I completely agree with ElCaldwell’s assumption that that her frustration with existing perspectives on the Gilded Age comes from teachers and students, not from historians. The common high school textbook or lesson plan from high school teachers usually wants to hit the huge history events before and after the Gilded Age and skims the time period by unfortunately, using terms that now drive the popular perception of the Gilded Age as one of pure corruption, crony capitalism and Jim Crow. Yet, even with these possibly misinformed high school textbooks, Edward’s argument for a prolonged progressive era I believe falls short in comparison to Richard Schneirov’s argument in “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873-1898.” Detailing a case for the distinct period of the Gilded Age, Schneirov, in my opinion, provides us with a more convincing argument to label the Gilded Age as a distinct period of its own that has very distinctive characteristics. I felt that Scheirnov’s essay was more valid than Edward’s as it used numerous historiographical evidence to support his claim for the periodization of the Gilded Age. Because this blog post does not allow me to go into further detail, our next assignment regarding a historiography, I will expand upon the great historiographical example by Scheirnov. Along with his examination of recent work and supporting evidence of periodization, Scheirnov briefly explains his opinion on the beginning date of this period and the differing views surrounding this seemingly unimportant but extremely interesting periodization factor. This possible small scale difference opens up the flood gates for a bigger question and a historiographical analysis of the start and finish of the Gilded Age.

January 22, 2014December 16, 2020

Questioning the Causality of a Changing Political Economy

Blog Post for 01/23/14

I found myself to be particularly intrigued by the discussion concerning the merit of greed during the Gilded Age during class on Tuesday. Particularly whether or not the newfound focus on capital accumulation, or what some might call greed, was either 1.) an inherently unnecessary evil 2.) a good in itself or 3.) a necessary component of economci progress that, while often having immoral motivations, is beneficial on the macro-level. Richard Schneirov’s article entitled Thought on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873-1898 provides intriguing ideas to help us address this question. Ultimately his work seems to point towards the third understanding that posits as a necessary component of economic progress

Schneirov defines the Gilded Age as book-ended by two important transitions: a shift from a “self-employed” (196) mode of production to a capitalist one and from a proprietary competitive capitalist order to a corporate administered one. While both of these transitions are relevant to the question at hand, the first transition to a capitalist mode of production is of particular interest in the way that it illuminates the necessity of capital accumulation as an engine of progress. Schneirov, borrowing from Marx’s Capital, explains the progression from “simple commodity production” (199) where capital is merely a medium of exchange so as to procure commodity of equal value (C-M-C) and capitalism in which capital is invested into commodity in hopes of a profit (M-C-M). Fundamental to “simple commodity production” was an understanding among citizens that labor created value and that ethical exchange should thusly be equal. Schneirov points out the errors of this belief in noting that this supposed theft from producers was what modern economists would understand to be “the economy’s surplus, the sine qua non and the engine of progress and development.” (199) This understanding leads to an extraordinarily interesting notion concerning the causality of the economic shift during the Gilded Age; this shift towards a political economy focused on capital accumulation can be seen to have caused, or at the very least allowed for, the rise of big business and industrialization. This contrasts what seems to be a commonly accepted view that industrialization created the greedy economic culture of the Gilded Age. This is important to the question at hand because it demonstrates that a focus on capital accumulation (or what some might label as greed) was a necessary component of economic progress and not an avoidable vice or isolated shortcoming of the Gilded Age.

A question that still needs to be addressed is whether or not a political economy of capital accumulation is, by nature, driven by greed or, conversely, whether or not participants in the economy can invariably aim to maximize profits without being necessarily greedy.

January 22, 2014December 16, 2020

Bringing Space and Place to the Gilded Age

This past summer I went to Santiago, Chile with my family before the start of my semester abroad. My parents desired to leave the city because they felt Chile had more to offer than a large Western-feeling space. To my parents, cities could feel repetitive (having lived in New York for about 50 years). Parisians and Romans may disagree but I found this to be true of Dublin, Ireland as well. Upon arriving, my family immediately wanted to depart for the countryside because we felt like the city was not offering us anything we had not experienced before. “Bringing the City Back in: Space and Place in the Urban History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era” by James Connolly challenged my views of cities by bringing to light variations in spacial arrangements and “the specific history of social, economic, political, and cultural interaction that creates identities” (271). Many of these variations are associated with the Gilded Age and are distinctions that you might not pick up on if you are a tourist visiting a city for only three days.

These problems arise when people are quick to lump things together. Sherwood’s post questions, “Is the generalized overview more illuminating than the examination of a specific instance, or vice versa?” Rebecca Edwards in “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History” jokes about herself being a “lumper extraordinaire,” and although I admire her fight to rename history, I don’t agree with her oversimplification of history. History does not always fit neatly into years, in the same way spaces are created by cities. There is a benefit to classifying eras by the main components that make them unique, or their identities, which is reaffirmed in Sherwood’s post: “for the average students of history, there is little wisdom to be gained from the study of broad, general trends.” Place and space are typically geographical terms, but their concepts can be applied to history as well.

January 22, 2014December 16, 2020

Historicization in historical study versus popular imagination

All three articles for Thursday’s reading examine the ways in which we think about history and the lenses through which we examine it. Rebecca Edwards, of New Spirits fame, continues the thoughtful discussion that we have been having as a class about whether the moniker of “Gilded Age” is appropriate for the time period we are discussing. Rightly, she argues, as we have discussed, that the most prominent Gilded Age stereotypes do not fully characterize the era. To wit, she raises the Grange movement, the Populist party, the American Farmer’s Alliance, the Interstate Commerce Act, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and muckraking journalism, among other items.

Edwards’ ardent argument regarding historicization of the Gilded Age clearly emerges from a depth of knowledge, and I don’t seek to reject her interpretation out of hand; yet, I think that her frustration with existing perspectives on the Gilded Age comes from teachers and students, not from historians. The dominant narrative of the Gilded Age, which Edwards’ glosses in her opening paragraphs, does not, I believe, dominate the historical literature inappropriately. Rather, the nuance with which Edwards would like students of history to examine the Gilded Age is lost in the shuffle of high school classes which cover American history from colonialism to the eve of World War 2. Unfortunately, that lost nuance drives popular perception of the Gilded Age as one of pure corruption, crony capitalism and Jim Crow. Yet, serious students of history still examine these issues with the perceptiveness and depth which Edwards desires. It is simply not reasonable to expect that the nation as a whole will embrace a complex vision of each era of history when eras themselves tend to get reduced down to their very essence by teachers who must move through them in a week.

I fully agree with Price’s perspective that the Supreme Court’s conservative decisions during this period eviscerated the ability of reformers to make serious legislative progress. His analysis is also apt in that he acknowledges the inadequacies of Edwards’ argument regarding the significance of reform in this period. I would like to reiterate my own perspective: the dominant narrative of this period does not eliminate the possibility of the existence of counter-narrative occurrences; rather, the dominant narrative exists because is most accurately summarizes the dominant trends in Gilded Age society.

January 22, 2014December 16, 2020

The Progressive Era: A Culmination of Social, Economic, and Political Reform

Edwards, Progressive, Culture Continue reading “The Progressive Era: A Culmination of Social, Economic, and Political Reform”

January 22, 2014December 16, 2020

“Melting Pot–Disintegration of Individualism”

The post Civil War period known of as the Gilded Age embodied many changes in the American society. In James Connolly’s article he looks at the notion of “new urban history”. This focuses on the broad social changes that occurred during the Gilded Age. As referenced in Catherine’s post, she address the advancement in technology and the growth of capital. These new advancements became important to society because they allowed for the expansion and growth of America (through rail roads), and increasing diversity (through steamboat technology) of the American population. A phrase used to describe the American population is as a “melting pot”, but this phrase can also be used to define the decreasing desire to identify with individual culture and the “melting” of all individuals into urban culture. In Richard Schneirov’s written work, he attempts to periodize the Gilded Age through looking at capital, society and politics. Focusing more specifically on the aspect of society Schneirov looks at urbanization and industrialization and the idea of individualism. Individualism is something that I find to be of high importance when discussing the Gilded Age. With the transition to increased industrialization augments can be made that show how in this upcoming capitalist society how people have become part of a system and lack the interdependence that is become less prominent. In a capitalist society people can become lost as a result of being tied to their commute or working schedule in citifies or suburbs. Or farmers, who rely on machines and mass scale production as opposed to being self sufficient and only providing for ones family. An argument can be made that capitalism drives peoples desires to make money and become wealthy.

Shcallaway’s post brings up an interesting point connecting the work of James Connolly and Charles Calhoun. Both authors look at defining the Gilded Age and the effectiveness of the terms industrialization and urbanization. Unplanned urban growth and increasing capital are aspects in proving how people became more focused on their social status then the importance of themselves (as individuals). The importance and meaning in individualism is imperative when looking back on cultural history and what drives society.