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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.