The Johnstown Flood (edit title)

Timothy Gray approved Ulrich’s request to change the title of The Johnstown Flood Saturday, November 7 2009.

Ulrich changed the title of The Johnstown Flood Friday, November 6 2009.

Shelfari edited the description of The Johnstown Flood Friday, July 31 2009.

• David McCullough is known to millions as the author of the critically acclaimed, best-selling books The Great Bridge, The Path Between the Seas, and Mornings on Horseback, and as host of the popular PBS television series "Smithsonian World?' The Johnstown Flood, David McCullough's first book, was praised by Time magazine as a "meticulously researched, vivid account of one of the most stunning disasters in U.S. history." At the end of the last century, Johnstown,.Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hard-working families striving for a piece 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 an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity: among them 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 townspeople. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal. From research in the voluminous records, diaries, letters, interviews with numbers of survivors, and a rare, previously unknown transcript of a private investigation conducted by the Pennsylvania Railroad, David McCullough vividly re-creates the chain of events that led to the catastrophe, and then unfolds the incredible story of the flood itself and its aftermath. Graced by David McCullough's remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in 19th-century America, of overweening confidence, energy, and tragedy. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly.

Eileen M edited the ridiculously simplified synopsis of The Johnstown Flood Saturday, July 25 2009.

• Added: RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! THE DAM IS BUST!

Shelfari edited the contributors of The Johnstown Flood Thursday, July 23 2009.

• Added a contributor: David G. McCullough: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of The Johnstown Flood Friday, July 17 2009.

• Again that morning there had been a bright frost in the hollow below the dam, and the sun was not up long before storm clouds rolled in from the southeast.