The flood year 1927 : a cultural history

Resource Information

The work The flood year 1927 : a cultural history represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Waubonsee Community College. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The flood year 1927 : a cultural history

Title remainder

a cultural history

Statement of responsibility

Susan Scott Parrish

Creator

• Parrish, Susan Scott

Author

• Parrish, Susan Scott

Subject

• Mississippi River Valley -- History -- 1865-
• Mississippi River Valley -- In literature
• Disaster relief -- Mississippi River Valley -- History -- 20th century
• Since 1865
• Mississippi River Valley -- Social conditions -- 20th century
• Floods -- Mississippi River Valley -- History -- 20th century

Language

eng

Summary

"The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which covered nearly thirty thousand square miles across seven states, was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history. Due to the speed of new media and the slow progress of the flood, this was the first environmental disaster to be experienced on a mass scale. As it moved from north to south down an environmentally and technologically altered valley, inundating plantations and displacing more than half a million people, the flood provoked an intense and lasting cultural response. The Flood Year 1927 draws from newspapers, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, vaudeville, blues songs, poetry, and fiction to show how this event took on public meanings. Americans at first seemed united in what Herbert Hoover called a "great relief machine," but deep rifts soon arose. Southerners, pointing to faulty federal levee design, decried the attack of Yankee water. The condition of African American evacuees in “concentration camps” prompted pundits like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells to warn of the return of slavery to Dixie. And environmentalists like Gifford Pinchot called the flood “the most colossal blunder in civilized history.” Susan Scott Parrish examines how these and other key figures--from entertainers Will Rogers, Miller & Lyles, and Bessie Smith to authors Sterling Brown, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright--shaped public awareness and collective memory of the event. The crises of this period that usually dominate historical accounts are war and financial collapse, but The Flood Year 1927 enables us to assess how mediated environmental disasters became central to modern consciousness" -- From the publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

• 977/.043
• 976./042
• 977./032

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

LC call number

F354

LC item number

.P27 2017

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography