“Like a tornado” he says. “Falling in love feels like a fucking tornado blowing through your emotions.” Chuckling to himself, he plates the food. “That sounds terrifying” I say. I’m surprised to hear my voice come out so strongly because I feel anything but strong. His back still towards me, he nods. “It is.”

A new history of the causes of the American Civil War, highlighting the role played by ordinary men in the secession debate and process.

When hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other disasters strike, we count our losses, search for causes, commiserate with victims, and initiate relief efforts. Amply illustrated and expansively researched, Inventing Disaster explains the origins and development of this predictable, even ritualized, culture of calamity over three centuries, exploring its roots in the revolutions in science, information, and emotion that were part of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and America. Beginning with the collapse of the early seventeenth-century Jamestown colony, ending with the deadly Johnstown flood of 1889, and highlighting fires, epidemics, earthquakes, and exploding steamboats along the way, Cynthia A. Kierner tells horrific stories of culturally significant calamities and their victims and charts efforts to explain, prevent, and relieve disaster-related losses. Although how we interpret and respond to disasters has changed in some ways since the nineteenth century, Kierner demonstrates that, for better or worse, the intellectual, economic, and political environments of earlier eras forged our own twenty-first-century approach to disaster, shaping the stories we tell, the precautions we ponder, and the remedies we prescribe for disaster-ravaged communities.

Fire and Emergency Services Administration: Management and Leadership Practices, Second Edition covers the latest course objectives from the Fire and Emergency Services Higher Education’s (FESHE) Bachelor’s Core Level Fire and Emergency Services Administration model curriculum. To effectively lead modern public safety organizations and the various components within them, individuals must possess a solid understanding of the always-changing issues that face the fire and emergency medical services. The second edition of Fire and Emergency Services Administration: Management and Leadership Practices has been completely updated to deliver the very latest information needed to understand these challenges and will assist managers in making the proper decisions that can impact all aspects of their organization. The Second Edition features: Expanded emphasis on management and leadership of EMS operations. Updated budgeting financial strategies, including advice on how to overcome shrinking budgets and economic downturn. New guidance on hiring and diversity. Expanded coverage on training, education, and fire fighter safety. The following features are incorporated throughout the Second Edition: Chapter Objectives: FESHE Objectives and Knowledge Objectives are listed at the beginning of each chapter, including page references. Case Studies: Real-life incidents help stimulate student discussion and highlight important concepts. Facts and Figures: Provides useful and interesting history, facts, and other research relating to the fire and emergency services. Words of Wisdom: Presents powerful and informative quotes from organizational leaders and experts in their fields. Chief Officer Tips: Targeted advice to deal with common administrative issues and introduce techniques to implement change. Chapter Activities: End-of-chapter Fire and EMS activities reinforce important concepts and improve students’ comprehension.

Fire and Emergency Services Administration: Management and Leadership Practices, Third Edition, provides aspiring and current chief officers who administer, manage, or lead fire, emergency medical services (EMS), rescue, and/or emergency management organizations with the knowledge to make policy decisions and the skills needed to lead their organizations through progressive change.

In the colonial era, Charleston, South Carolina, was the largest city in the American South. From 1700 to 1775 its growth rate was exceeded in the New World only by that of Philadelphia. The first comprehensive study of this crucial colonial center, Building Charleston charts the rise of one of early America's great cities, revealing its importance to the evolution of both South Carolina and the British Atlantic world during the eighteenth century. In many of the southern colonies, plantation agriculture was the sole source of prosperity, shaping the destiny of nearly all inhabitants, both free and enslaved. The insistence of South Carolina's founders on the creation of towns, however, meant that this colony, unlike its counterparts, would also be shaped by the imperatives of urban society. In this respect, South Carolina followed developments in the rest of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, where towns were growing rapidly in size and influence. At the vanguard of change, burgeoning urban spaces across the British Atlantic ushered in industrial development, consumerism, social restructuring, and a new era in political life. Charleston proved no less an engine of change for the colonial Low Country, promoting early industrialization, forging an ambitious middle class, a consumer society, and a vigorous political scene. Bringing these previously neglected aspects of early South Carolinian society to our attention, Emma Hart challenges the popular image of the prerevolutionary South as a society completely shaped by staple agriculture. Moreover, Building Charleston places the colonial American town, for the first time, at the very heart of a transatlantic process of urban development.