Author: rebekahbenninger1

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In Steven Biel’s introduction to American Disasters writes how each disaster can be written about in a multitude of ways. He writes about how each disaster affects the American nation culturally, socially, and politically. He goes on to discuss how he separated the book into four separate themes: Capital, Faith, Community, and Possibility. Each theme describes a different viewpoint on many of the different disasters. The Capital section is described through articles that describe how disasters either helped along capital profiteering or how the disasters delayed the advancement of capital profiteering. In counterpoint to the Capital section, the Faith section is described through articles that investigated into the connections between the disasters and the religious beliefs of the time. On the other hand, the Community section is described through articles that analyzed how the different communities of professional, ethnic, urban, and suburban each reacted to the man-made or natural disasters that befell the community at that time. While the Possibility section is described through disasters articles that urged the people reading about the disaster into thinking about other possible viewpoints that could be taken about the disaster. By using peterrossi1’s blog about Bergman’s article, stated that disaster should be “looked from a natural and human viewpoint to totally understand them” shows that each disaster can be seen from multiple viewpoints.

Using the beginning of Biel’s introduction article about the research and expedition in finding the Titanic, in which you can combine three of the four section: Capital, Community, and Possibility. The Capital viewpoint came into Biel introduction through how the research crew didn’t know if they would be able to do the Live television show because of extremely rough weather. Community was shown in how Biel and the television show anchors were ready to take over if something happened with the Live documentary. The last section which is Possibility is shown in how the use of television has changed the modern viewpoint on what is supposed to be now known as disasters. He also mentions that the different articles in the book are on big disasters everyone knows about but the articles are also on little known disasters that hardly anyone knows about.

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Cameron Blevins wrote the blog post “Digital History’s Perpetual Future Tense.” In the blog post he compared when historians tried to use quantitative digital history as a way to explain history and the newer use of public history as a way to explain history through a digital format. Each format has a unique outlook but only one of the two digital histories have been accepted by the majority of historians.

Of the two digital histories the use of quantitative history in digital history was the least looked upon favorably. The reason for this was that the numbers that were used to make the arguments was reducing the actual history into an experiment that could tested and recreated. This lead to digital historians distancing themselves from explaining history through mere numbers. On the other hand the use of public history in digital history has had a much better review from historians. Even if digital public history does not use the argumentative structure as the main structure for how it is dispersed. As explained by the National Council on Public History, “public history prioritizes “an interest and commitment to making history relevant and useful in the public sphere.”” I agree when mckenndy21 stated that public history is “one of the most influential sources of history reaching out to a much broader and diverse audience than any other sort of humanity topic or reading.” Between quantitative history and public history, public history has helped advance digital history as a valuable tool for historians but as Blevins said towards the end of his blog post digital history needs to actively be used to make new arguments for history instead of just being talked about.

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Throughout most of the human race’s written history there has been problems connected with the different types of race or ethnicity a person could be born into. For this class the easiest representation of this concept is ‘white’ Americans vs. other ethnic Americans that live within American borders.

Much like in juanrosasmp’s post ‘businessmen and marx’, I also noticed that in the article Whiteness and Race many of the works of fiction and even people from history that is mentioned all somehow revolve around business and the placement of people with ‘lower’ ethnicities. The works of fiction range from Out of This Furnace to King Coal, all of which have different groups complaining about another different group for one reason or another. Often times this was because different ethnic groups were readily hired over another, with African Americans being some of the last to be hired of the multitude people looking for work. Of course then there is the people from history that are mentioned. Such as Fredrick Douglass, Malcom X and Alex Hayley, all of whom had speculations about white immigrants coming over that could take available jobs from or learn to instantly start being racist towards African Americans. Roediger brought up that most of the social historians focused more on white immigrants and how they were treated within America instead of any overall history of how all immigrants within America were treated. Which could connect to Marxism through the idea that ethnic groups are not being treated in similar manners to another. That connects with Roediger statement that history surrounding the groups that are not considered ‘white’ enough and time periods where they were held under microscopes are the most studied. This is most likely because they are considered so different from the ideal whiteness.

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In the beginning of the semester many of the blog posts were more like summaries of the article we were to read for the following day’s class. An example of this is peterrossi1’s post Theory of City Development, where he summarizes the first Cronon article. But as time moved on, many of the blog posts have moved from being summaries of the articles to being posts on the answering of certain theories in history or answering the class title for the readings. Zhedrick’s post Leave Isaac Alone showcases this excellently, as it is not a summary of the first 2 chapter of the book but a showing of Larson blaming the Weather Bureau through Isaac Cline.

Just as the posts evolve through the semester one broad theme does not. The theme that is brought up in many of the posts is death aspect in the disasters. This is to be expected in a class about American Disasters. Many of the articles and posts on the Chicago Fire are more on how or who caused the Fire, although the last article did have mentions on the Fire being a reckoning for the city and how there might have been lynching of criminals in the chaos brought by the Fire. In the case of the Johnstown Flood death was mentioned in the use of Dark Tourism as summarized by sanchezron13. While the Galveston Hurricane death mentioned in the finding of the many dead and how to get rid of the many corpses as described by juanrosasmp. Although throughout all the posts one of the main ideas is that each disaster happened by human causes or were not prevented because of human inaction/incompetence.

Much as death is a broad topic and blog posts have evolved, I was surprised at how my posts have evolved. In the beginning I was able to answer the topic well but as I posted I was not able to answer the posts quite as well. This was not a big surprise when I posted on ‘Isaac’s Storm’ because I didn’t quite know how to post on the book. Although I thought I had answered the post of Author’s Intent, I reread it and noticed I could have written parts of the post better.

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An author’s intent changes depending on the type of person an author is and also what type of book is being written. According to Professor Shrout, Erik Larson’s intent is to argue that the Weather Bureau and Isaac Cline had barely any clue what as to what was approaching the city of Galveston. Craig Offman’s article ‘A tempest around “Isaac’s Storm”’, seems to take the approach that Erik Larson’s intent is that he finds Isaac Cline to be fairly useless up to and during the Hurricane, and that Isaac and his brother Joseph had a fairly antagonistic rivalry with one another.
Offman’s article is about how Larson explains Isaac was the false “Galveston-area…Paul Revere”, the relationship between the meteorologist brothers after the hurricane, and how Larson might have over exaggerated the classification of the hurricane that devastated Galveston. Offman explains that initially Isaac was reported to have gone around warning people to leave before the hurricane could hit Galveston, but that with Larson’s Isaac’s Storm the person who was the one warning people to get out was Isaac’s brother Joseph. The article explains that according to Larson the two brother’s had bad relationship after the hurricane, but that according to the meteorologist Lew Fincher, Larson was exaggerating the brother’s relationship and that Fincher had quoted in his book that the brothers still spoke warmly to one another after Galveston. The classification of the Galveston hurricane seems to be up in the air. According to Offman, Larson used category 5 in Isaac’s Storm but that Larson conceded it was officially declared a category 4, while Fincher stated it was a category 3 or 4. Based off of this evidence Craig Offman’s intent seems to be to report that Larson gives a new viewpoint to the Galveston hurricane but that not everything with the book is factual. The only problem that comes from Offman’s article is that it is “his personal view on the review he is giving for the book” to quote chriscobar.

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The final two chapters of Isaac’s Storm, are about the aftermath of the Hurricane and how the city went about fixing the resulting problems. In the book it says that the first thing anyone that as approaching the city of Galveston, whether from land or from sea, was the smell of death that lingered in the air from all of those whom had died in the Hurricane, as attested to by Captain Simmons and Col. William Sterett. Although anyone approaching the city of Galveston on a train could unfortunately see all of the personal and emotional destruction in the waters that the Hurricane brought so far inland that the train could not get all the way into Galveston making the passengers need a boat to approach the city properly. One thing all the survivors could agree upon was to try to locate any missing persons from their families until they were found alive or as a corpse. Often times the families found their missing family member because they were listed as one of dead in the newspaper. All of these dead as stated by gravity21 were first “attempted to bury the dead but as the stench of dead started to overpower the city and so many bodies remaining to be buried, they eventually resorted to mass burnings in attempt to quicken the process,” eventually having to resort to burning the excess corpses.

Isaac had stated he felt a sense of guilt for not having thought the storm would be so severe, even attested some of his anger to Joseph for having the forethought to warn people to evacuate before the Hurricane could hit. Of course afterwards the town built a wall and lifted the town up several feet. All of these contribute to allowing people of present-day to see the reactions to similar storms of the present that had happened in the past.

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Erik Larson’s book “Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History” is told from the viewpoint of Isaac Cline, the Galveston meteorologist in the year 1900, during the hurricane that hit the town of Galveston. In the Prologue of Isaac’s Storm Larson starts by telling the reader about some of Isaac’s background that lead him to being the Galveston meteorologist. Larson also tells throughout the Prologue about Isaac’s day leading up to the hurricane that would eventually hit Galveston.

Throughout the first chapter Larson describes the different weather phenomena’s that were major discoveries that all lead to Isaac Cline eventually being interested in hail and going from a scientific interested child to an army surgeon, and eventually to a meteorologist. From these major discoveries us readers can take that while storms are always being searched for, there will always be some amount of death toll because there are always some that cannot get away. Much like how it was stated in johnkane’s Johnstown Flood post that the dam used against the Conemaugh River was “doomed to break and people all around the dam knew that it was not gonna be long until it happened.” Larson also has in the latter half of the first chapter that Isaac at “only twenty-nine… considered himself a weather sage,” and thus knew better that others. We can take from the first chapter not to rely on one source for all information because the people of Galveston relied on the word of only one person for weather protection. The second chapter seems to be that throughout the chapter that because if poor communication and mapmaking, ship captains had been allowed to sail their ships into the oncoming hurricane.

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As stated by Professor Shrout and the author Jeremy D. Popkin, a Historiography is the history of history. Popkin states that, “to study historiography is to begin to understand how historians think and how they do their work…,” or in a way everyone can probably understand a historiography is a way to help understand how past historians decided on their projects and the ways the historian went about making the project happen.

Popkin’s book is all about the concerns and different ways a historiography can be written. He also explains that while a historiography helps teach about history, it also helps teach the reader about the historian who wrote the historiography. These historians can range from the past with Machiavelli and Marc Bloch, to present day with filmmakers, historical websites and other such electronic-based tools. Having these sources of history will always help people to understand the past and how our present day world has come about. However that only works as long as each source is proven to be as accurate as possible to how the real history was played out and not the ‘emotionally charged myths’ that can affect the present day world. Unfortunately there are many different ways to interpret history. To quote from sevallos’ blog post, “Chicago’s geographic advantages as a city needed much improvement upon the land in order to be utilized.” This quote could be taken from: a geographical historian, a financial historian, a social historian, or even possibly a cultural historian point of view. Although it does not matter whose viewpoint it is from, as long as the reader takes the history presented from their own way of viewing the history.