The Epistemology and Politics of the Accidental: Connecting the Accident’s Intellectual and...

The Epistemology and Politics of the Accidental:Connecting the Accident’s Intellectual and CulturalHistoriography

Ryan Anthony Vieira*Department of History, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

In recent years, historians on both sides of the Atlantic have begun to reconsider the accident as anhistorical phenomenon. Whereas the historical treatment of accidents between the 1950s and 1980stended to focus on how the accident contributed to a larger narrative of progress, the more recentliterature has begun to focus on the accident’s role in wider social, political, and cultural contexts.As the historiography has developed, however, there has been only limited theoretical debate acrosssub-disciplinary lines. The present paper does not represent an exhaustive examination of therecent historical literature on accidents in both Europe and North America. Instead, it focusses onbridging the gap between those historians who have studied the intellectual development of theaccident as a concept and those who have studied the cultural intersection between the accidentand power. It does this by focussing on the centrality of narrative in both historiographic trajecto-ries and by suggesting that through a focus on narrative we can connect the epistemologicalassumptions inherent within the accident concept and the strategies employed to culturally managethe anxieties and stresses which violent technological disasters bring to the surface.

Seventy three seconds into its nationally televised launch, on 28 January 1986, the spaceshuttle Challenger exploded and all of the ship’s seven crew members were instantlykilled. Three days later, President Ronald Reagan delivered a eulogy at Johnson SpaceCentre, where he asked his audience to ‘‘think back to the pioneers of an earlier cen-tury… who took their families and their belongings and set out into the frontier of theAmerican West.’’ ‘‘Often,’’ the President told his audience, these pioneers ‘‘met with ter-rible hardship…[b]ut grief only steeled them to the journey ahead.’’ ‘‘Today,’’ he contin-ued ‘‘the frontier is space and the boundaries of human knowledge. Sometimes, whenwe reach for the stars, we fall short. But we must pick ourselves up again and press ondespite the pain.’’1 This sentiment was echoed by the Rogers Commission, which hadbeen set up to identify the cause of the Challenger accident and make recommendationsfor corrective action. In its report, the Commission emphasized the need to transform theChallenger disaster into an opportunity for progress: ‘‘a milestone on the way to achiev-ing the full potential that space offers to mankind.’’2 After identifying what it saw as the‘‘causes’’ and ‘‘contributing causes of the accident’’, the Commission recommended itsreforms and, in concluding, wrote that it ‘‘applauds NASA’s spectacular achievements ofthe past and anticipates impressive achievements to come.’’3 While the sight of the Chal-lenger explosion set off a sense of national emergency, the explosion’s representation asan ‘‘accident’’ made it but a moment in the nation’s romantic story of masculine resolve,progress and emancipation. Through the use of narrative, the Challenger explosionbecame the ‘‘Challenger accident’’ which, in turn, was absorbed by a language in theservice of power.

History Compass 11/3 (2013): 227–234, 10.1111/hic3.12035

ª 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

I.

As philosopher Paul Virilio has argued, the practice of thinking and speaking disasters as‘‘accidents’’ has been central to the operation of power in the technologically saturatedpolitical cultures of modern Europe and North America.4 Not only have violent techno-logical failures regularly captured the attention of the press on these continents but, ashistorians since J.G.A Pocock have observed, the right to rule in the modern West hasoften been bound up with the claimed ability to manage contingency.5 This being thecase, it is more than a little surprising that, just over a decade ago, historians Roger Cooterand Bill Luckin could write that while ‘‘accidents can seem nearly as pervasive as the airwe breathe… there is hardly a comparable subject in which historical investigation hasbeen so meagre.’’6 To be sure, accidents had received historiographic attention before thelate 1990s but this body of work was quantitatively small and tended to unquestionablyaccept the culturally prevalent positivist vision of accidents as the lessons which spur pro-gress. Missing from this literature was a critical appreciation of the accident as a culturallymediated idea that is related historically to the circulation of power. Though the recenthistoriography evinces a shift in this direction, a lack of theoretical debate amongst histo-rians across sub-disciplinary boundaries has continued to hamper our understanding of theaccident as an intellectual, cultural, and inherently political phenomenon. The presentpaper helps to remedy this problem by bringing the intellectual historiography of theaccident concept together with the cultural and political historiography of accident dis-course. It does this by stressing the presence of a narrative hermeneutics in the findingsof historians in both historiographic trajectories. Through this operation the paper helpsto clarify the relationship between the accident’s intellectual and cultural historiographywith the intention of clearing the ground for a new dialogue between intellectual histori-ans and historians of political culture.

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the historiographic treatment of untoward incidentswas limited to a handful of studies that operated through the analytical lens of liberal posi-tivism, with its progressive sense of historicity rooted in cause ⁄effect relations. Labour his-torians and historians of technology, for instance, often represented accidents as thoseterrible lessons through which modern safety systems evolved. To this effect, Helen andBaron Duckham represented Victorian colliery disasters as landmarks on ‘‘the road tosafety’’ and, similarly, L.T.C. Rolt wrote in his 1955 book on British railway disasters thatwhile ‘‘[i]t may sound a paradox… it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it is the acci-dents described in this book which have made our railways the safest in the world.’’7 Dur-ing this period, legal and political historians also tended to use progress as the prismthrough which they viewed accidents. In P.W.J. Bartrip’s and S.B. Burman’s 1983 studyof industrial regulation in Victorian Britain, workplace accidents are represented as eventswhich facilitated the early development of the Welfare State by helping to bring about thechange from a policy concentration on safety to one focussed on compensation.8 Like-wise, in their 1967 study of workers’ compensation claims in American tort law, LawrenceFriedman and Jack Ladinsky argued that the increasing number of accidents over thecourse of the nineteenth century helped to make an anachronism of common law contriv-ances that absolved employers of liability.9 As with their counterparts in labour historyand the history of technology, then, these legal and political historians conceive of theaccident’s relationship to history in terms of the dialectic between problem and solution.

The tendency to historiographically treat the accident as a motor of progress was, inpart, caused by a lack of reflection on the accident as a culturally mediated idea. By themid-1980s some historians began to shift their focus away from the role of accidents in

228 The Epistemology and Politics of the Accidental

ª 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 11/3 (2013): 227–234, 10.1111/hic3.12035

larger metanarratives and towards how the accident, as a concept, operated in wider cul-tures and systems of social relations. In this context, a few historians began to study theaccident’s intellectual history. As early as 1977, for instance, Wolfgang Schivelbuschexamined how the increasing sophistication and technical precision of the nineteenth-century railway helped to enhance the harshness with which railway accidents were per-ceived both in popular and medical discourse and, in 1985, Karl Figlio outlined how themodern nonfeasance understanding of accidents was rooted in the nineteenth-century riseof the contract as the basis of social relations.10 Meanwhile, other historians began tostudy how the accident as a concept intersected with existing systems of power. In 1988,for instance, historians R.W. Kostal and Christopher Tomlins both published articleswhich explained the legal and political regulation of accidents in North America in termsof hegemony and disciplinary power.11 Such studies marked a clear break with the earlierhistoriography.

Since the 1980s the historiographic treatment of accidents has grown significantly notonly in volume but also in its variety and degree of critical reflection. There is now a ser-ies of significant bodies of literature relating to accidents and their intersection with rela-tions of power, including social and gender histories of occupational health, the politicaleconomy of railway disasters, and the cultural and intellectual history of risk.12 Despitethis expansion, however, there has been little theoretical dialogue across sub-disciplinarylines and this lack of debate has, in turn, hindered our ability to think more generallyabout the accident as a component of culture. In some of the most recent literature,however, the issue of narrative and its hermeneutics has figured prominently. This isespecially the case in the intellectual and cultural historiography. In an effort to demon-strate the possibility of greater dialogue across the sub-disciplines, the remainder of thispaper uses this common theme of narrative to connect the epistemological assumptions ofthe accident as an idea with the discursive operations of the accident as a language in theservice of power.

II.

Over the past decade, intellectual historians have charted the changing epistemologicalassumptions inherent within the concept ‘‘accident.’’ In their respective works on thissubject, historians Michael Witmore, Herman Loimer, and Ross Hamilton show how theaccident’s initial conceptualization, in the philosophy of Aristotle, was as a thing that hadno per-se cause, did not fit the wider metaphysical scheme and from which no meaning-ful knowledge could be gained.13 According to these historians, this conceptualizationpersisted until, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, accidents became rede-fined on the premise that they provided insight to a hidden knowledge, either as manifes-tations of God’s will or as chance unveilings of nature’s forms.14 In the English speakingworld, the providential understanding of accidents was culturally dominant until the clos-ing decades of the eighteenth-century when the rise of probabilistic thinking and prac-tices of first aid began to erode its legitimacy.15 Though the rhetoric of providencecertainly did not die with the eighteenth century, major crises throughout the nineteenthcentury, such as the 1845 Irish Potato Famine, helped strip away much of its respectabil-ity.16 By the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, then, theview of accidents as things that ‘‘just happen’’ was prevalent in Anglo-American thoughtand, as historian Judith Green argues, was increasingly used as an indicator of rationalityand intellectual maturity.17 But, while modernized and secularized, the accident did notreturn to its earlier status as an epistemological dead end. Instead it continued to contain

The Epistemology and Politics of the Accidental 229


the promise of revelation, though now it promised the knowledge of how to eliminatesimilar future disasters.18 According to the recent intellectual historiography, then, theassurance of revelation represents an epistemological hallmark that unifies the accident’sconceptual development from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. From here we canbegin to connect the intellectual history of the accident with a narrative hermeneuticsand, from there, with the cultural history of the accident’s relation to power.

Since the modern understanding of an accident centres on it being the unwilled andunpredicted result of an earlier discoverable and knowable cause, as a phenomenon thatcan be understood only through the sequential ordering of earlier events, the revelation itpromises can only occur through the construction of narrative. As Witmore puts it, ‘‘Thisview of accident as an opportunity for revelation in the broadest sense depends… on itsassociation with narrative contriving.’’19 Of course, the accident is not only thoughtthrough a narrative structure, it is also spoken as narrative and thus it is through its cul-tural appearance as a ‘‘narrative artifact’’, to borrow Witmore’s phrase, that the meaningand politics of the accident are negotiated. This can be seen at the policy level insofar asaccident legislation depends on how causality, blame and the state of the accident victimare fictively rendered. Indeed, historians Nan Goodman and Julian Go III have bothrecently demonstrated that the rise of negligence in late-nineteenth and twentieth-centuryAmerican workers’ compensation policy was contingent as much on changes within thediscursive framing and literary telling of accidents as it was on the perceived increases inthe number of accidents (as Friedman and Ladinsky argued) or changes within the acci-dent concept (as Figlio would have us believe).20 The link between the accident, narra-tive and power, however, is not limited simply to policy formation.

Narrative is not only the means through which policy initiatives are constructed andsold, it is also the mechanism by which accidents interact with the wider culture. To besure, it is narrative that allows the accident to be represented and re-imagined throughtropes and plots that give voice to the identities, ideas, anxieties and concerns which arepervasive at a given cultural moment. It is for this reason that, in his recent study of theTitanic’s sinking, Steven Biel reminded his reader, that accidents occur ‘‘at a culturalmoment rather than in a vacuum’’ and these moments are ‘‘full of resonances, implica-tions, relations and associations.’’21 Indeed, historian Roger Cooter has argued that it isthis ability of accident discourse to absorb wider cultural meanings and anxieties thatexplains its prominence in public debate.22 As a highly public language that gives voicenot only to the normative ideas and identities of a culture but also to the anxieties and‘‘deeper strains and stresses’’ which underpin that culture, the accident becomes a poten-tial threat to existing power structures and something that must be managed anddisarmed.23

The historiography points to a number of ways that the popular anxieties broughttogether by the accident have been managed. Given the affinity between the accidentand narrative telling, however, it should not be surprising that among these techniques isthe situating of accidents within stories that reinforce the dominant culture and the rela-tions of power on which it is based. As we have already seen with the explosion of Chal-lenger, one such narrative form is to be found in the rendering of progress throughromantic conventions that emphasize how resolve in the face of loss contributes to theadvance of human freedom. In a similar vein, Patricia Owens’ recent study of the rhetoricsurrounding non-American civilian casualties in post 9 ⁄11 American warfare shows howa rhetoric of ‘‘accidents’’ has been deployed to normalize such casualties by thinking andtelling them within a story of technical progress and liberal humanitarian warfare.24

According to Owens, the representation of civilian deaths as ‘‘accidents’’ resulting from



technical imperfection works not only to absolve the American military and governmentof responsibility, but also provides for the justification of American wars on the basis oftheir progressively humanitarian character. Much like the seven astronauts aboard Chal-lenger, then, these dead civilians become ‘‘milestones’’ on the way to greater human free-dom. The use of such romantic narratives, of course, both predates and is moreubiquitous than either the post 9 ⁄ 11 justification of civilian casualties or the Challengerdisaster.

In his recent book on the culture surrounding technical innovation in late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century Britain and Germany, Bernhard Rieger how accidents gener-ated ‘‘immense public attention…[and] brought to the surface widespread fears that usu-ally remained submerged.’’25 Yet, as Rieger also notes, accidents ‘‘did not constituteturning points in the popular understanding of technology’’ and they certainly did noteffect a ‘‘rejection of innovation.’’26 Somehow, the ‘‘deep-seated anxieties’’ and ‘‘silentapprehensions’’ that accidents ‘‘brought into the open’’ were not only contained but alsotransformed into a bulwark for ‘‘a cultural climate conducive to innovation.’’27 Riegerargues that this was done through action at multiple levels, from the establishment of for-mal government commissions which promised the identification of an accident’s cause tothe production of press releases and advertising campaigns by British and German engi-neering firms. In all cases, however, one of the central techniques was to situate the tech-nical failure within a larger story that played on culturally prevalent understandings of therelationship between white European masculinity and historical progress. This narrativedepicted history as ‘‘a never-ending dialectical process’’ that linked technical advance withemancipation but which required Europeans to ‘‘conquer their anxieties about technolog-ical innovations through a ‘manly’ demeanor that signalled self-discipline and emotionalself-control,’’ features that ‘‘compared favorably with the alleged ‘effeminate’ attitudestowards technology in Africa and Asia.’’28 Through this bigger story, Rieger argues, theaccident ceased to be a site of anxiety and society was placed ‘‘under a moral obligationto intensify its quests for technical perfection.’’29

Romance, of course, is not the only narrative form that has been used to inscribemeaning on the accident. Indeed, the historiography points to melodrama and tragedy asbeing equally prevalent. Whereas romantic constructions of the accident revolved aroundsociety’s ability to resolutely overcome the violence and loss occasioned by technologicaldisaster, melodramatic and tragic emplotments focussed on the victims of the accidentand emphasized their dignity in the face of inevitable death as well as the impact of theaccident on their dependents. Despite these clear differences from romance, however,melodrama and tragedy could work equally well to disarm the accident’s subversivepotential. A good example of this is provided by Biel’s book on the cultural meanings ofthe Titanic, where we are shown how a narrative that played upon the tropes of whitemiddleclass ‘‘heroism… [and] chivalric self-sacrifice’’ was deployed to imagine and makesense of the disaster while simultaneously easing anxieties over contemporary gender andracial tensions.30 This narrative contrasted an image of the white, middle-class male pas-senger who used his last minutes to help women and children from all backgroundsescape their deaths, with a representation of the often black or foreign male from thesteerage who, panicked and fear stricken, tried to fight his way into the lifeboats.31 In thisway, Biel argues, ‘‘the Titanic carried meanings that defined and shored up the status quoagainst disquieting change.’’32 Shoring up the status quo, however, was not the only waythat tragedy and melodrama could disarm the subversive potential of the accident.

Tragic and melodramatic narratives that focussed on the accident victim and the acci-dent’s impact on his ⁄her family worked to individualize and humanize technological



disaster in such a way that they distracted the audience from wider structural questions.In her recent study of workplace accidents in Victorian Britain and the United States,Jamie Bronstein outlines how press reports of industrial accidents tended to produce nar-ratives that played on the moral sensibilities and ‘‘Christian good feeling’’ of the Victorianmiddle class by ‘‘emphasizing the extreme youth, female gender, or inexperience ofworkers who were killed or wounded, the number and condition of dependents, and theworkers last words.’’33 Such narratives, Bronstein argues, rendered the accident as a tragicbut individual event resulting either from the carelessness of the worker or from the willof God. Accounts such as these differed markedly from working class accident discourseand, while they allowed accident victims and their families to tap into the middle classcharity industry, they also tended to downplay the need for wider structural change.34

Indeed, Bronstein claims that by treating workplace disasters as ‘‘accidents’’ rather than‘‘an integral part of the system of management and production’’ these tragic and melodra-matic narratives helped to limit the potential for changes in workers’ compensation orindustrial regulation policy.35 ‘‘Because they were rendered as individual stories of badluck,’’ Bronstein writes, ‘‘these narratives of families destroyed usually failed to make theconnection between repeated accidents and the need for increased safety or more certainmonetary compensation.’’36 As a mode of fictively rendering accidents, narratives thatemployed the conventions of tragedy and melodrama could work to protect existingpower structures just as well as narratives that were romantically emploted.

III.

The treatment of accidents by historians on both sides of the Atlantic has changed signifi-cantly over approximately the past decade. In particular, the literature has grown in vol-ume and the analytic focus of the historiography has started to develop a more criticalappreciation of the relationship between the accident and the social and cultural environ-ment in which it occurs. Yet, as this body of work has developed, it has remained frac-tured along sub-disciplinary lines and a lack of theoretical debate across these divides hashindered our ability to think more generally about how the accident functions, intellectu-ally, culturally and politically. The present paper has not aimed at an exhaustive survey ofaccident historiography but has instead focussed its attention on clarifying the relationshipbetween the accident’s intellectual and cultural historiography. As we have seen, much ofthe recent work in these two bodies of historical writing seems to converge around theissue of narrative: for intellectual historians, narrative seems to follow naturally from theassumptions about knowledge that are contained in the accident’s modern conceptualdevelopment and, for historians of political culture, narrative represents one of the pri-mary linguistic mechanisms by which the potentially disruptive character of the accidentis managed and disarmed. Given the prominence of a narrative hermeneutics in the find-ings of historians from both trajectories it would seem that there is much potential foropening up a dialogue across sub-disciplinary lines. Such a dialogue would provide uswith a more full understanding of the accident.

Short Biography

Ryan Vieira is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the University ofCalifornia, Berkley. He is broadly interested in the nineteenth-century development ofBritish political culture and, more particularly, in questions of how a consciousness ofmodernity impacted that development. In 2011 he completed a Ph.D. in Modern British



History at McMaster University and he has previously published articles in History andTheory and the Journal of Liberal History.

Notes

* Correspondence: SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Scholar, 19 Ashford Boulevard, Hamilton, OntarioCanada, L8M 2T9. Email: [email protected].

1 ‘‘Transcript for the President’s Eulogy for the Seven Challenger Astronauts,’’ New York Times, 1 Feb. 1986, sec.1: 11.2 The Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report of the Presidential Commission onthe Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, (1986), vol. 1, 1.3 Ibid., vol. 1, 201.4 Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, Julie Rose, trans., (New York: Polity Press, 2005).5 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Daniel Engster, Divine Sovereignty: The Origins of Modern State Power, (De-Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001); Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning underMussolini and Hitler, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Peter Fritzsche ‘‘Nazi Modern,’’ Modernism ⁄ Modernity,3 (1996), 1–21.6 Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin, ‘‘Accidents in History: An Introduction,’’ in Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin,Accidents in History: Injuries, Fatalities and Social Relations, (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), 1.7 Helen and Baron Duckham, Great Pit Disasters: Great Britain 1700 to the Present Day, (London: David and CharlesNewton Abbot, 1973); LTC Rolt, Red for Danger: The Classic History of British Railway Disasters, (London: Pan,1986), 16. A similar interpretation of railway accidents can be found, ten years later, in the work of O.S. Nock, seeO.S. Nock, Historic Railway Disasters, (London: Arrow Books, 1966).8 According to Bartrip and Burman this shift in policy foreshadowed the Welfare State insofar as it advanced ‘‘theconcept of collective responsibility for the worst consequences of unexpected misfortune’’ and the belief that thebeneficiaries of a worker’s labour owed him support, irrespective of fault, in case of injury or death. P.W.J Bartripand S.B. Burman, The Wounded Soldiers of Industry: Industrial Compensation Policy, 1833–1897, (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1983), 35–36.9 Lawrence M Friedman and Jack Ladinsky, ‘‘Social Change and the Law of Industrial Accidents,’’ Columbia LawReview, 67 (1967), 50–82.10 Karl Figlio, ‘‘What is an Accident?’’ Paul Weindling, The Social History of Occupational Health, (London: CroomHelm, 1985), 180–208; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in theNineteenth Century, (New York: Berg, 1977).11 R. W. Kostal, ‘‘Legal Justice, Social Justice: An Incursion into the Social History of Work-Related AccidentLaw in Ontario, 1860–1886,’’ Law and History Review, 6, 1, (Spring, 1988), 1–24; Christopher Tomlins, ‘‘A Myste-rious Power: Industrial Accidents and the Legal Construction of Employment Relations in Massachusetts, 1800–1850,’’ Law and History Review, 6, 2, (Autumn, 1988), 375–438.12 On these subjects see, Robert Storey, ‘‘From Invisibility to Equality? Women Workers and the Gendering ofWorkers’ Compensation in Ontario, 1900–2005,’’ Labour ⁄ Le Travail, 64 (2009), 75–106; Barbara Harrison, ‘‘AreAccidents Gender Neutral? The Case of Women’s Industrial Work in Britain, 1880–1914,’’ Women’s History Review,2:2 (2006), 253–275; Mark Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965, (Balti-more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); R.W. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825–1875,(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Ralph Harrington, ‘‘Railway Safety and Railway Slaughter: RailwayAccidents, Government and Public in Victorian Britain,’’ Journal of Victorian Culture, 8, 2, (2003), 187–207; RalphHarrington, ‘‘The Neuroses of the Railway,’’ History Today, 44, 7 (July 1994), 15–21; Ralph Harrington, ‘‘TheRailway Accident: Trains, Trauma and Technological Crisis in Nineteenth-Century Britain,’’ in Mark Micale andPaul Lerner, eds., Traumatic Pasts: History Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2001), 31–56; David Niget and Martin Petitclerc, eds., Pour une histoire du risque: Quebec,France, Belgique, (Quebec: Presses de l’Universite du Quebec, 2012); Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk:Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).13 Hermann Loimer, Mag Driur, and Michael Guarnieri, ‘‘Accidents and Acts of God: A History of Terms,’’ Amer-ican Journal of Public Helath, 86:1, (January 1996), 101; Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledgesin Early Modern England, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 30; Virilio, The Original Accident, 10; RossHamilton, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 11–20.14 Though I do not have the space here to outline the various forms of providential thinking that informed earlymodern accident discourse, Witmore provides a detailed account. In particular, he outlines three branches ofthought on the subject: (1) as either God’s bringing together of separate causal chains in order to effect an ostensiblyunwilled result; (2) as ostensibly chance occurrences that represented God’s ‘‘special and enduring care for the



world’’; (3) as the results of God’s wrathful judgement of those affected by the misfortune. Witmore, Culture of Acci-dents, 90.15 Roy Porter, ‘‘Accidents in the Eighteenth Century,’’ in Cooter and Luckin, Accidents in History, 90–106.16 Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865,(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).17 Figlio, ‘‘What is an Accident’’; Judith Green, Risk and Misfortune: A Social Construction of Accidents, (London:University College London Press, 1997), 12.18 John C. Burnham, Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology and the Misfits of the Machine Age, (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2009); John C. Burnham, ‘‘Accident Proneness (Ufallneigung): A Classic Case ofSimultaneous Discovery ⁄ Construction in Psychology,’’ Science in Context, 21, (1), 99–118; John C Burnham, ‘‘TheSyndrome of Accident Proneness (Unfallneigung): Why Psychiatrists did not Adopt and Medicalize It,’’ History ofPsychiatry, 19, (3), 251–74; John C Burnham, ‘‘Why Did Infants Die? Shifts in Americans’ Ideas of Responsibilityfor Accidents: From Blaming Mom to Engineering, Journal of Social History, 29, 4, (Summer 1996), 817–837; MonaGleason, ‘‘From ‘Disgraceful Carelessness’ to ‘Intelligent Precaution’: Accidents and the Public Child in EnglishCanada,’’ Journal of Family History, 30, 2, (April, 2005), 230–41.19 Witmore, Culture of Accidents, 5.20 Nan Goodman, Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Julian Go III, ‘‘Inventing Industrial Accidents and their Insurance:Discourse and Workers’ Compensation in the United States, 1880s-1910s,’’ Social Science History, 20, 3, (Autumn,1996), 401–38.21 Steven Biel, Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster, (London: W.W. Norton, 1997),10.22 Roger Cooter, ‘‘The Moment of the Accident: Culture, Militarism and Modernity in Late-Victorian Britain,’’in Cooter and Luckin, Accidents in History, 123.23 Ibid, 110.24 Patricia Owens, ‘‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen: The Liberal Politics of High-Technology ‘Humanitarian’ War,’’Millenium: Journal of International Studies, 32, 3, (2003), 595–616.25 Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–1945, (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005), 51–52.26 Ibid., 52.27 Ibid., 55.28 Ibid., 39.29 Ibid., 76.30 Biel, Down with the Old Canoe, 23.31 Ibid., 46–47.32 Ibid., 57.33 Jamie Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain,(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 61; Jamie Bronstein, ‘‘Caught in the Machinery: The Cultural Mean-ings of Workplace Accidents in Victorian Britain and the United States,’’ Maryland Historical Magazine, 96, 2, (Sum-mer, 2001), 163–84.34 On the ways in which narrative accounts of industrial accidents by the Victorian middleclass tended to downplaythe need for wide ranging structural reform, also see Mike Sanders, ‘‘Manufacturing Accident: Industrialism and theWorker’s Body in Early Victorian Fiction,’’ Victorian Literature and Culture, (2000), 313–29.35 Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery, 3.36 Ibid., 63.



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