"Accidents and Disasters in the US and the World"
Jamie Piertruska, Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
In the present day, catastrophe has become commonplace in the United States and around the world. The number of billion-dollar weather- and climate-related disasters in the United States has increased sharply in the 21st century, with a record-setting 28 billion-dollar disasters in 2023 followed by 27 in 2024. A major factor in this trend is the global temperature record: the past 10 years (2015-2024) are the hottest 10 years in recorded history. Approximately 94 percent of Americans live in a county that has received FEMA aid since 2011, and insurers worldwide reported $140 billion USD in losses to natural hazards in 2024, the third-highest total on record. How did we get to where we are today?
Although accidents and disasters are often understood as isolated, rare events, they have become increasingly central to the history of the United States and the world over the past four centuries. Through efforts to anticipate hazards, develop new tools for risk management, build infrastructures for relief, expand government capacity for disaster response, and remember victims, accidents and disasters have become a part of everyday life. In this seminar, we will explore the material and environmental dimensions of disaster alongside shifting cultural meanings of catastrophe. We will begin with an introduction to some concepts (including normal accidents, unnatural disasters, and disaster capitalism) that scholars have used to understand risk and catastrophe in modern life. Then we will trace the history of hurricane prediction, beginning with knowledge about hurricanes in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic World, then examining the late nineteenth-century use of telegraph networks for storm tracking and the creation of the U.S. hurricane reporting network in the West Indies during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, and concluding with computerized hurricane forecast models in the context of Hurricane Katrina. The seminar will also suggest ways to incorporate the history of disaster into broader themes in U.S. history courses, including American imperial expansion, the growth of federal administrative capacity, and racialized patterns of housing and transportation in American cities.