Explores case studies of Christian fundamentalism, anti-environmentalism, gun rights messaging, and the Trump administration to understand how appeals to catastrophe are used to unite Americans.

Between 1846 and 1873, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide. Madley describes pre-contact California and precursors to the genocide before explaining how the Gold Rush stirred vigilante violence against California Indians. He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and the broad societal, judicial, and political support for genocide. Many participated: vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. congressmen, California governors, and others. The state and federal governments spent at least $1,700,000 on campaigns against California Indians. Besides evaluating government officials’ culpability, Madley considers why the slaughter constituted genocide and how other possible genocides within and beyond the Americas might be investigated using the methods presented in this groundbreaking book.

In the aftermath of disaster, literary and other cultural representations of the event can play a role in the renegotiation of political power. In Disaster Writing, Mark D. Anderson analyzes four natural disasters in Latin America that acquired national significance and symbolism through literary mediation: the 1930 cyclone in the Dominican Republic, volcanic eruptions in Central America, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, and recurring drought in northeastern Brazil. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the disaster narratives, Anderson explores concepts such as the social construction of risk, landscape as political and cultural geography, vulnerability as the convergence of natural hazard and social marginalization, and the cultural mediation of trauma and loss. He shows how the political and historical contexts suggest a systematic link between natural disaster and cultural politics.

Analyzes the threat of an electromagnetic pulse event, arguing that America's defenses are not prepared for a natural or man-made incident that could devastate a country almost entirely dependent on its electrical grid for power and communication

The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis—both experiential and existential—at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events. Seasons of Misery addresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity.

The making of a refugee - Life in the camp - Revolution and political evolution - Israeli military raids - Camp economy - Lebanese civil war - Journey into a new life - A new American home and the return to Palestine - The destruction of Nahr el Bared camp: the unrecorded story.

A study of contexts of crisis, which examines the role of writers and intellectuals in working toward social justice.

Jhally and Earp (both of the Media Education Foundation) originally conducted the 25 interviews collected here for an eponymous documentary on the use of the fear caused by the September 11th attacks to launch longstanding neoconservative plans to solidify and extend American global hegemony through military force.

Catastrophe begins on January 20,1993 when William Jefferson Clinton took the oath of office, swearing to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" from enemies both foreign and domestic and chronicles the next 8 years leading to the events of September 11, 2001. This book demonstrates that the events of September 11 were not only predictable after eight years of Clinton, they were also preventable. Catastrophe exposes what really happened during the Clinton years, and how Bill Clinton and his administration systematically undermined America's national security by emasculating the U.S. military and nations intelligence agencies. Bill Clinton made America vulnerable to attack. Great dangers still threaten us. But to prepare for them we must understand how they were caused. Only then can we take the appropriate measures to ensure America's security.