An innovative study that tracks the naming of hurricanes over six decades, exploring the interplay between naming practice and wider American culture. In Tempest: Hurricane Naming and American Culture, Liz Skilton blends gender studies with environmental history to analyse this often controversial tradition.
"Liz Skilton began her research with a simple question: why do we name hurricanes? In answering that question, she provides a fascinating tour of American government, society and culture in the twentieth century, and today. You will think differently about the next hurricane (and other disasters) after reading this engaging book." --Matthew Mulcahy, author of Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783
"Tempest: Hurricane Naming and American Culture is an original and insightful account of gender and hurricane history--an eminently readable cultural analysis of the approximately two-and-a-half decades when these violent storms received exclusively female names."--James Rodger Fleming, author of Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control
"Liz Skilton's Tempest: Hurricane Naming and American Culture offers a highly imaginative blend of environmental history and gender studies. It is difficult to imagine that anyone could do a better job of turning a seemingly narrow topic into a major exploration of American cultural history in the post-World War II era. Skilton is a skilled writer and an even better historian, and the insights she offers will change the way environmental scholars deal with the cultural construction of storms and other 'natural' phenomena."--Raymond Arsenault, coeditor of Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida
