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The beautiful story of 1 of America’s great disasters, a preventable tragedy of Gilded Age America, brilliantly told by master historian David McCullough.
At the finish of the nineteenth century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled up with hardworking families striving for a bit of the nation’s burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for a special summer resort patronized by the tycoons of this same industrial prosperity, included in this Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal.
Graced by David McCullough’s amazing gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood can be an absorbing, classic portrait of life in nineteenth-century America, of overweening confidence, of energy, and of tragedy. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the threat of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they may be necessarily behaving responsibly.