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The Johnstown Flood

Amazon.com Price:  $9.88 (as of 12/04/2019 06:59 PST- Details)

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Description

The stunning story of one of The us’s great disasters, a preventable tragedy of Gilded Age The us, brilliantly told by master historian David McCullough.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was once a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation’s burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been abruptly rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. In spite of repeated warnings of imaginable danger, nothing was once done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people. It was once a tragedy that became a national scandal.

Graced by David McCullough’s remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in nineteenth-century The us, of overweening confidence, of energy, and of tragedy. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they’re necessarily behaving responsibly.
The history of civil engineering may sound boring, but in David McCullough’s hands it is, well, riveting. His award-winning histories of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal were preceded by this account of the disastrous dam failure that drowned Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1889. Written whilst the last survivors of the flood were still alive, McCullough’s narrative weaves the stories of the town, the wealthy men who owned the dam, and the forces of nature into a seamless whole. His account is unforgettable: “The wave kept on coming straight toward him, heading for the very heart of the city. Stores, houses, trees, everything was once going down in front of it, and the closer it came, the bigger it gave the impression to grow…. The height of the wall of water was once a minimum of thirty-six feet at the center…. The drowning and devastation of the city took as regards to ten minutes.” A powerful, definitive book, and a tribute to the thousands who died in The us’s worst inland flood. –Mary Ellen Curtin

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