Disaster Citizenship is an impressive accomplishment that offers a great deal to those interested in social history, the history of the working class, the history of progressivism, urban history, state building in the Progressive Era, the US-Canada borderlands, and comparative approaches to the study of history.
H-Net Review Remes's excellent and engaging book contributes to ... Read morelong-running debates about the nature of working-class life, to more recent discussions of transnational progressive reform and state-society relations and to current conversations
both popular and scholarly
about events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.
Labor: Studies in Working Class History Remes' impressive research demonstrates throughout that even though the actions of working-class people drew on tight social bonds and a deep reservoir of local knowledge, their behavior was often illegible to the ascendant class of relief managers and government experts.
Journal of American History An excellent historical study rooted in high quality research. Remes' management of the two case studies successfully supports his central arguments relating to the state, the people, and ways of forming citizenship at times of crisis and relief, and his methodologies encourage us to look at disasters, both past and present, in new ways.
Labour/Le Travail Remes is among the vanguard of the new disaster historians, motivated by the twenty-first century wave of disasters to search out antecedents that help us understand the formation of a modern state that 'manages' (or does not manage) disasters like Hurricane Katrina. . . . A tour de force of method for the new disaster history, and hopefully a portent of things to come in this emerging field.
American Historical Review Jacob A. C. Remes has shed new light over a broad terrain of Progressive Era historiography through this richly researched, sensitive, transnational comparison of the 1914 Salem, Massachusetts fire and the 1917 Halifax, Nova Scotia explosion.
New England Quarterly Show Less