| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nan Goodman. Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 198. $39.50.

Nan Goodman's book is an original interdisciplinary study of the understanding of accidents in American culture. The author provocatively demonstrates that the American attempt to make sense of accidents interrelates with larger questions of causation, human agency, and social responsibility sent spinning by rapid modernization, especially in the nineteenth century. 1

The strongest chapters of Goodman's volume explore works by James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Charles Chestnutt—all with an eye to the accidents on the frontier, on board ship, and in factories that these works contain. Less curious than it is refreshing, Goodman's focus results both in new readings of important individual nineteenth-century works and in the convincing underscoring of parallels and continuities among the works. Especially insightful are her treatments of Twain's views on accident insurance and Crane's sense of cross-race rescues in emergency situations. Overall, Goodman makes her point that "nowhere was the significance of the new doctrine of accidents more visible than in the pages of the accident narratives that began . . . to permeate the literary marketplace" (p. 4). . . .

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