Die Natur der Gefahr: Überschwemmungen am Ohio River im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert

Von Uwe Lübken

Hardly any other river has suffered as greatly from the drastic confluences of natural and cultural dynamics as the Ohio River. The waterway, an important means of transport and communication, was vital to the growth of the Ohio Valley region in the nineteenth century.Commercial hubs and industrial cities, such as Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati, sprung up along its banks; it served both as a sewer and as the infrastructural artery. However, this seemingly harmonious union of nature and culture was called into question by repeated flooding. Uwe Lübken has examined both the increasing use of flood plains and the assimilation of flooding into local knowledge, analysing the ways in which past disasters were remembered or forgotten and the history of flood defences. He presents the history of flooding in the Ohio River as a history of risk, in which river use and hazards are closely intertwined.

• Sprache: Deutsch
• Herausgeber: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
• Erscheinungsdatum: 19. Feb. 2014
• ISBN: 9783647317069

Uwe Lübken

Uwe Lübken joined the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in 2009 and currently serves as director of the project “Disaster Migration in a Historical Perspective”. His habilitation thesis on flooding of the Ohio River was published in 2014. His most recent publications include, as an editor, two special issues of the journal Global Environment on Environmental Change and Migration in History (9/2012) and on Small Islands and Natural Hazards ( 8 (1/2015, New Series ), and, together with Greg Bankoff and Jordan Sand, Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World (2012).

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