As Sarah<\/a> notes in her post, many historians have critiqued McCullough for his writing style for not being truly historical or academic in nature. While some of this criticism is certainly well deserved, I would like to note that his patchwork style is extremely valuable in the way that it allows us to understand the Johnstown Flood as a structural societal fault, rather than one of individual culpability.<\/p>\n

One of the largest takeaways from our class discussion on Tuesday was the way in which McCullough was able to effectively diffuse blame among individuals. This was accomplished by skillfully weaving together a narrative that references a multitude of characters rather than focusing on one character that best represents the narrative that he is hoping to portray. No one person\u2019s action is overly singled out as accountable. Interestingly, The Johnstown\u2019s Flood <\/i>was still able to single out heroic actions. It is this inability to conclusively find fault and this ability to identify heroes that is of great interest to me, particularly in the way that it parallels the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911. I recently wrote a paper for another class that attempted to argue that the Triangle Fire is so imprinted into the national memory because of its massive juxtaposition between public understanding and legal recourse. To provide some background the Triangle Fire was a factory fire that resulted in the deaths of 146 women. Importantly, it resulted from an improperly constructed building with a faulty fire escape, locked doors that actually prevented workers from escaping, and a complete lack of any fire protocol or oversight by its owners who were repeatedly warned of its dangers. Yet despite seemingly obviously guilt, no one was charged. This to me was the most interesting; the fire seemed to occupy precisely the point in history at which public understanding outpaced legislation. General public understanding acknowledged the insufficiency and evils of factory conditions and the culpability of owners for consciously risking lives to increase profits, yet, despite this public agreement, legal recourse didn\u2019t exist. To public the Triangle Fire clearly the fault of the individual owners, yet legally it was representative of a societal deficiency that individuals couldn\u2019t be held accountable for. In the same way McCulloughs writing style implicitly argues that the Johnstown Flood, regardless of how many seemingly inexcusable individual faults contributed to its destructiveness was, at its core, a structural flaw in society. As tempting as it is to blame the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, after all they were basely responsible for the dam\u2019s dangerous conditions, McCullough prose seems to suggest that the disaster was truly born from structural flaws. This is strongly paralleled by the way that there was a massive public outcry for the condemnation of the factories owners, yet a preceding report had shown that, relative to other garment factories, the Triangle Factory had far from the most dangerous conditions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Sarah notes in her post, many historians have critiqued McCullough for his writing style for not being truly historical or academic in nature. While some of this criticism is certainly well deserved, I would like to note that his patchwork style is extremely valuable in the way that it allows us to understand the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Societal v. Individual Culpability: Parallels between Johnstown’s and Triangle’s Historical Narratives”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[94,237,382,401],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-david-mccullough","tag-johnstown-flood","tag-societal-failures","tag-triangle-factory-fire-of-1911"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","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\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":894,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions\/894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}