Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters

A disaster often reveals as much about the society wrestling with it as it does about its origins and its physical effects. If scientists focus on the source of the danger—a virus, bacteria, climatic shifts, or disease-carrying animals and insects –and how to combat it, historians explore the impact of human decision-making, social structures, and social norms on these tragedies that are too often understood or dismissed as “natural disasters.” In this issue, five historians look at the way in which a society’s complex and often unconscious reactions to disasters shape their impact. They offer us a closer look at the human context in which a disaster runs its course.

In “Yellow Fever 1793,” prize-winning historian Richard Brookhiser looks at the horrible illness that cost the lives of almost 5,000 residents of America’s capital city, Philadelphia. People stricken with the disease developed chills and fevers and vomited black bile, and their skin took on a yellow cast. Unable to prescribe a cure or find the source of the disease, medical experts fell into arguments about the proper treatment of the disease. Citizens, lacking any confidence in their expertise, fled the city in droves. Members of the city government and the federal government fled as well. Only Philadelphia’s mayor, like the captain of a sinking ship, remained in town, running the city with the help of volunteers, both Black and White, drawn from every social class. As the temperatures dropped, the fever disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived. Recriminations and accusations were one legacy of the epidemic.

In his essay, “The Influenza of 1918 and the Coronavirus of 2020: Some Parallels and Differences,” John Barry offers us a clear, unvarnished examination of two major disasters in American history: the 1918 influenza pandemic and today’s Covid-19 pandemic. He provides a succinct comparison between the two pandemics, first laying out the similarities between the two viruses and then pointing out their significant differences. He stresses one very significant commonality that focuses on politics rather than epidemiology: in both cases, the US government minimized the disease, misleading the public. Barry ends with unanswered questions about the future: Will the US prove resilient? Will small businesses recover? What will be the result of changes in work habits as a result of the virus?

In her essay, “Invisible Threats and the Politics of Disaster: Three Mile Island and Covid-19,” Professor Natasha Zaretsky makes explicit the historian’s need to contextualize disasters and analyze the politics of these disasters. In 1979, human error led to the partial meltdown of the nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island, a meltdown that raised the specter of radiation poisoning for the local population. In 2019 and 2020, a virus capable of global spread caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people across the world. But in both cases, Zaretsky argues, the social context in which these tragedies occurred bear striking similarities: both eras were marked by a climate of distrust of government and deep cultural divisions within society. Disasters, she writes, bring “into sharp relief the social, racial, and economic inequalities” that existed before tragedies like Three Mile Island and Covid-19 struck.

Scott Gabriel Knowles and Bucky Stanton offer an example of activist response to disasters in “History in the Making: COVIDCalls and the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Recognizing that disasters are now a permanent feature of American life, these authors have helped create a program to educate the public, and particularly school children, about the current pandemic and to “inspire greater curiosity into the structural issues” that COVID-19 has made apparent. Like Professor Zaretsky, they want Americans to put this disaster in historical context and help them to understand the deeper social structures the pandemic has revealed. Through discussions with historians, scientists, and disaster researchers, COVIDCalls examines decisions made in many disasters to protect some citizens more than others, to privilege the health of some over others; in other words, to help us analyze “disaster inequalities” based on social class and race.

In her essay, “The Importance of Studying Disasters: Ideas and Advice for the Classroom,” Professor Liz Skilton shares with us the techniques she has developed to enable students to be historians of disasters and community responses to them. Skilton lays out the variety of sources available for the classroom: the fundamental facts such as the number of fatalities, the financial costs, and the changes in the environment that resulted from the disaster; social media accounts, including videos of events and personal responses on the many social media platforms; and oral histories. Oral histories, in particular, allow students to understand the recovery processes—both material and psychological—that a community goes through after a disaster. Skilton offers step-by-step suggestions for preparing an assignment that encourages students to think about how disasters shape the lives within a community and how that community responds to the challenges it faces in the aftermath of disaster.

The special feature for this issue of History Now is drawn from a primary source. It is an excerpt from a 1794 pamphlet entitled A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia written by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two African American ministers, to defend Philadelphia’s black community against racist interpretations of their actions during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. Professor James G. Basker provides an introductory headnote, and will include the Narrative among more than one hundred historic texts by African Americans in his forthcoming anthology, Black Writers of the Founding Era, 1760−1800, to be published by the Library of America.

Nicole Seary and I hope that your school year has begun well and that you remain safe over the coming months. As teachers, you are frontline heroes, no less than medical men and women, in these days of the pandemic.

Carol Berkin, Editor
Nicole Seary, Associate Editor