How do communities react when faced with epidemics, earthquakes, and other disasters? Using significant historical calamities ranging from the collapse of the early seventeenth-century Jamestown colony, ending with the deadly Johnstown flood of 1889, historian Cynthia A. Kierner explores European and American development of predictable, even ritualized, responses to catastrophe. In her timely book Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood, Kierner chronicles three centuries of woe, exploring how even though how we interpret and respond to disasters has changed, the intellectual, economic, and political environments of earlier eras has helped shape our modern approach to dealing with disaster. Kierner is a professor of history at George Mason University and the author of Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello. Sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.