Reported by Sydney Brown, class of 2026 &Yuruo Zhang, class of 2027
On Thursday, November 7 2024, the Archives and History Initiative hosted a Book Proposal Workshop. The workshop focused on Professor Jan Hua-Henning’s proposal for his first book Incendiary Cities: Fire, Technology, and the Origins of Modern Emergency Response in Germany and the U.S., 1800-1900. Guest speaker Scott G. Knowles from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology provided feedback on the proposal. Duke Kunshan University (DKU) Professors Titas Chakraborty, Zach Fredman, Joseph Giacomelli, Andrew Fields, and Archivist Ryder Kouba attended the workshop and provided feedback as well. Three students were also in attendance. The comments made by the professors were about the book proposal that was circulated in advance.
Professor Hua-Henning’s book project began in 2016 when he worked with a research group in Germany on critical infrastructures. The group questioned what is considered critical, and what societies deemed worthy of protection. Critical Infrastructure Protection, both a practical endeavor and topic of research, attracts much funding on both sides of the Atlantic. Hua-Henning started to investigate emergency services – rarely considered critical infrastructures – because they offer unique insight into what societies consider worthy of protection. The origins of emergency services lie in the nineteenth century and thereby in the development of early volunteer and paid fire departments. Fire services and the technologies they employed influenced all subsequent forms of emergency response. Incendiary Cities explores how and why emergency services evolved during the nineteenth century. The book argues that the technologies employed by fire services materialized norms and values that continue to guide risk response today.
Scott G. Knowles highlighted several points from the proposal including fire becoming politically and financially intolerable in US cities which created space for the firehouse. He pointed out that firefighting was an urban industrial occupation but occupied a space outside of the factory, and that firefighters were part of a malleable service economy.
Knowles praised Prof. Hua-Henning for his rich archival work and interaction with existing literature. He invited Jan Hua-Henning to further explain his transnational-comparative approach, which focuses on the United States and Germany during a time of rapid industrialization and imperialism. Knowles acknowledged that the book connects to a multitude of historiographies and therefore urged the author to highlight one main argument that allows addressing a broader audience. According to Knowles, the first half of the book connects to the literature on the networked city, while the second half of the book could be understood as a novel approach to transnational networks of risk and to gender in fire response.
Professor Hua-Henning provided a brief response to these comments. He highlighted that the main argument of the book is that firefighting was at the center of a deep transformation of risk management in the nineteenth century. Incendiary Cities takes a transnational approach because fire response evolved in a transnational sphere. The U.S. and Germany took a leading role in this development and compared themselves during this time of rapid industrialization.
Professors Fredman, Chakraborty, Giaocomelli, and Field also provided invaluable information about pathways to improving the argument, structure, and audience of the book. Professor Joseph Giaocemelli, for instance, highlighted that theorizing risk may be attractive to several groups of readers as it appeared as a common theme throughout Hua-Henning’s work.
