Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment

by Johns,Alessa

• ISBN13: 9780415921763
• ISBN10: 0415921767
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781136683961
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1999-06-21
• Publisher: Routledge
• More Book Details

Summary

Throughout history, varying responses to catastrophe have revealed much about a society's cultural and philosophical character. InDreadful Visitations, leading scholars of different disciplines examine eighteenth-century responses to natural disaster, showing how human agency played an active role in the creation of destructive circumstances, and how these disasters helped to establish national and moral identities in the Age of Reason. Contributors: David Arnold, Daniel Gordon, Carla Hesse, George Starr, Alan Taylor, Steven Tobriner and Charles Walker.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	xi
Alessa Johns
Part I: European Responses to Catastrophe
Confrontations with the Plague in Eighteenth-Century France	3	(28)
Daniel Gordon
Defoe and Disasters	31	(18)
G. A. Starr
Safety and Reconstruction of Noto after the Sicilian Earthquake of 1693---The Eighteenth-Century Context	49	(32)
Stephen Tobriner
Part II: Colonial Perspectives and New World Calamities
Hunger in the Garden of Plenty: The Bengal Famine of 1770	81	(32)
David Arnold
Shaking the Unstable Empire: The Lima, Quito, and Arequipa Earthquakes, 1746, 1783, and 1797	113	(32)
Charles F. Walker
``The Hungry Year'': 1789 on the Northern Border of Revolutionary America	145	(38)
Alan Taylor
Afterword	183	(8)
Carla Hesse
Contributors	191	(2)
Index	193