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As I was reading American Disasters and “Disaster: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” the way both addressed the issue of how disasters affected the human population caught my eye. In American Disasters Biel starts off with an anecdote of his experience with the “Titanic Live” which I think served as a good introduction into the meaning of what a disaster is and how it affects history. The sinking of the Titanic made history but the broadcasting of its wreckage “…redeemed history. Broadcast history also absorbed history. (Biel 3)” The broadcast gave new meaning to the disaster and made it relevant to the current time by the television to give people insight into what happened. Although many people see the sinking of the ship as a disaster it is not a natural thing; in “Disaster: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” ” Theodore Steinberg maintains that the notion of ‘natural disaster’ is somewhat strained if not completely wrongheaded in ‘a society that has so thoroughly tampered with nature’ (Bergman para.6).” I think Steinberg is making a good point because an event such as the Titanic sinking can definitely be seen as disastrous but people who consider it a ‘natural disaster” are mistaken for the sole reason that it was an event that occurred unnaturally. Of course the event involves nature but nature was provoked in some way; in the case of the Titanic incident it was the Titanic itself which was man made and not designed by nature to be in the Atlantic ocean. To me it seems as if disasters are nature’s response to an alteration of the environment made by man whether it be a ship sinking, a flood, or a fire. That being said, there are some instances where disasters are slightly more natural than others. Regardless of how disaster are started the effect they have falls mostly on society which is altered, while nature recuperates slowly over time. For example, “Charles Rosenberg’s groundbreaking 1962 study of the great cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century presents disaster as a product of social and medical knowledge (Bergman para.7).”