Forgotten Fires

A common stereotype about American Indians is that for centuries they lived in static harmony with nature, in a pristine wilderness that remained unchanged until European colonization. Omer C. Stewart was one of the first anthropologists to recognize that Native Americans made significant impact across a wide range of environments. Most important, they regularly used fire to manage plant communities and associated animal species through varied and localized habitat burning. In Forgotten Fires, editors Henry T. Lewis and M. Kat Anderson present Stewart's original research and insights, written in the 1950s yet still provocative today. Significant portions of Stewart's text have not been available until now, and Lewis and Anderson set Stewart's findings in the context of current knowledge about Native hunter-gatherers and their uses of fire.

A historical journey through the city’s catastrophic fires, and the stories of the heroes who fought them. Chicago’s war against cinder, flame, and smoke did not end with the Great Fire of 1871. In 1909, fire ripped through the dynamite room of a staging facility a mile and half off the Lake Michigan shoreline, transforming the pipe-laying operation into a raging inferno. During the World’s Columbian Exposition, thousands of fairgoers watched in horror as twelve firefighters were trapped in a blazing ice warehouse. An opera-goer left a smoking bomb under his seat at the Auditorium Theater in 1917. And the newly invented smoke ejector arrived too late to save firemen and laborers cut off in a sewer in 1931. Join John F. Hogan and Alex A. Burkholder for the history of these forgotten fires—and those who responded to them. “A must-read not only for first responders but also all history buffs, especially those interested in Chicago history.” —Robert Hoff, retired fire commissioner, Chicago Fire Department, from the foreword

Long considered both best friend and worst enemy to humankind, fire is at once creative and destructive. On the endangered tropical island of Madagascar, these two faces of fire have fueled a century-long conflict between rural farmers and island leaders. Based on detailed fieldwork in Malagasy villages and a thorough archival investigation, Isle of Fire offers a detailed analysis of why Madagascar has always been aflame, why it always will be aflame, and ultimately, as Christian Kull argues, why it should remain aflame.

While in the process of writing this book, a catastrophic event occurred in US firefighting history. An elite force of firefighters, nineteen in number (eighteen men and one woman), died while fighting a forest fire in Arizona. A wind shift placed this raging inferno head-on into this force. One TV announcer claimed the winds were gushing up to fifty miles per hour. Television programs showed viewers what these firefighters had to protect themselves. They lay flat on the ground and put this tentlike apparatus over them, which was probably made of a fire-retardant material, but this could not protect these heroes from thousand-degree temperatures and gusting winds, which turned this inferno similar to a flamethrower. As a firefighter, even though youve fought similar fires, many times you never take anything for granted. As you will see in this book, fires thought to be under control were turned into second and larger alarms. The red devil sometimes throws you a curve ball, and it can cost you your life and civilians lives. While you have this story fresh in your minds, say a prayer for these firefighters who got burned alive. And on the eighth day, God created firefighters.

For use in schools and libraries only. Twelve-year-old Vahan Kenderian, the son of an influential Armenian family in Turkey, struggles to survive alone after witnessing the deaths of many of his family and friends during the Armenian massacres of the early twentieth century.