| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America. By Kevin Rozario. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. x, 313 pp. $27.50, ISBN 978-0-226-72570-3.)
What explains the magnetism of calamity in modern America—the riveting images of nature gone mad on television and film; the blockbuster success of popularized accounts by the likes of Simon Winchester and Erik Larson; the transformation of death and destruction into a form of entertainment? It is a good question and one that Kevin Rozario takes up in this cultural history of calamity from the colonial period to Hurricane Katrina.	1
The history of disaster over the last three hundred years, Rozario argues, is united by "a widespread conviction, born of beliefs and experience, that calamities are instruments of progress" (p. 20). A common cultural thread weaves its way through disasters such as the 1638 New England earthquake, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and the September 11, 2001, disaster. Disparate these and the other disasters discussed in the book may be, but united they stand concerning the history of meaning: In their aftermaths there surfaced an overwhelming drive to find a silver lining in the catastrophe, a yearning to view disaster as a blessing in disguise.	. . .

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