Disasters in Working-Class History

What does it mean to be a disaster historian? My research—into the responses of working-class individuals and institutions to disasters in Salem, Mass., and Halifax, N.S.—uses a fire and a ship explosion as windows to understand progressive reform and reactions to it. That is, it was initially conceived of as a project that used disasters as a way to understand a what happened in the Progressive Era. However, it became a project that also explored how disasters and their social and political aftermaths exerted historical change. I became not just a working-class historian of the Progressive Era who used disaster to tell my story; I became a historian of disaster. I now teach disaster studies—in courses that include both history and a good deal of sociology—to adults who work in emergency response, management, and preparedness fields. In this talk, I will explore the tensions between the historical specificity of disaster history and the generalities of “disaster studies,” and I will talk about how teaching about disasters has broadened my historical understandings.