Online
Section Information for Fall 2023
This course explores urban disasters as globally historic events that provide a converging lens for understanding how the politics of disasters and accompanying social and economic forces have shaped cities and people's lives and deaths in the modern world. The course considers how catastrophic events impacting cities have transformed political institutions and how the impact of so-called "natural disasters" such as Hurricane Katrina are largely shaped by human actions and are decidedly not solely informed by nature. Looking at numerous historical episodes, we will examine crucial lessons from urban disasters that are essential for studying the past through the present of the 21st century. In a thematic organization, we will examine different types of disasters and their impact on cities and their hinterlands in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The course will consider real and imagined urban disasters caused by phenomena such as hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, chemical disasters, biological weapons, bombs, heat waves, disease, environmental contamination, and monsters. The course also considers the importance of disasters to the historical and artistic imagination of writers, painters, and filmmakers that have sought to depict the emotional lives of residents in cities that have been physically and psychically scarred by disaster.
HIST 387 DL1 is an online asynchronous section.
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Credits: 3-6
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