History Commons^™

The Changing Nature Of Catastrophe: A History Of Semantic Shift, Justine Von Arb

Honors Program Projects

Catastrophe, and the reporting of catastrophe, is prevalent in the present age, and catastrophic events are a part of the cultural memory. For America, events such as 9/11, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Hurricane Katrina, and the Challenger explosion, along with many other events, have filled newspapers and books, inspired documentaries and memorials, and, in many ways, reshaped the country. This paper investigated the changing nature of the word "catastrophe" and discovered the context of and the reasons for the shift in its meaning in 1748, as recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary. The Greek roots of the word, …