What is a disaster? And more importantly, who or what is responsible for it? Jonathan Bergman explores various perspectives and themes concerning how scholars have addressed these questions in his article \u201cDisaster: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.\u201d He notes how there has never been an established answer for either question. Before 1900, disaster was commonly accepted as divine retribution, with a vengeful God casting his judgment on a select community or area.\u00a0 More recently, however, scholars have contended that human agency is present in every \u201cnatural\u201d disaster. Matthew Mulcahy aptly reflects this view, noting \u201cdisasters become disasters only when natural forces meet human ones.\u201d (936) Regardless of these definitions, Bergman argues that disasters can serve as tools of revealing societal trends and civil conflicts.<\/p>\n

While Bergman may jump the gun a bit in describing disasters as \u201cuseful,\u201d his analysis makes interesting points on how natural and man-made disasters often fit into political debates. Conflicts triggered by American disasters, especially in the twentieth century, bear a remarkable resemblance to ones seen today. The Dust Bowl contributed to ideological divide between the traditional view of \u201crugged individualism\u201d and rising New Deal progressivism. The influx of the Spanish Flu in the early 1900s led to controversy concerning immigration and social homogeneity- concerns that have yet to subside. Bergman notes an evident parallelism between Mississippi Delta flooding in the 1920s and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the 2000s. Both ignited fiery debates concerning race, wealth, and governmental disaster relief. Overall, Bergman indicates that the \u201cusefulness\u201d of natural disasters lies in how they reveal social, economic, and political patterns that have adapted little over the course of time and are still prevalent today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is a disaster? And more importantly, who or what is responsible for it? Jonathan Bergman explores various perspectives and themes concerning how scholars have addressed these questions in his article \u201cDisaster: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.\u201d He notes how there has never been an established answer for either question. Before 1900, disaster was … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “When the Levees Break: The Revelatory Powers of Disaster”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[40,310,415],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bergman","tag-parallelism","tag-usefulness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1024,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/1024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}