In the Line of Fire or Moralists and Modernizers

In the Line of Fire: Trauma in the Emergency Services

Author: Cheryl Regehr

In the wake of disaster emergency responders are first on the scene and last to leave. They put concern for the lives of others over concern for their own lives, and work tirelessly to recover the bodies of the missing. Their heroic actions save lives, provide comfort to and care for the wounded and inspire onlookers, but at what cost to themselves? We now know that rescue workers who are exposed to mutilated bodies, mass destruction, multiple casualties, and life-threatening situations may become the hidden victims of disaster. The traumatic consequences of exposure can profoundly impact emergency responders, radiate to their families, and permeate the emergency organization. This much-needed new book, based on the authors' original research and clinical experience, describes the consequences of trauma exposure on police officers, fire fighters, and paramedics. Weaving data collected in large-scale quantitative studies with the personal stories of responders shared in qualitative interviews, this much-needed account explores the personal, organizational, and societal factors that can ameliorate or exacerbate traumatic response. Stress theory, organizational theory, crisis theory, and trauma theory provide a framework for understanding trauma responses and guiding intervention strategies. Using an ecological perspective, the authors explore interventions spanning prevention, disaster response, and follow-up, on individual, family, group, organizational, and community levels. They provide specific suggestions for planning intervention programs, developing trauma response teams, training emergency service responders and mental health professionals, and evaluating theeffectiveness of services provided. Disaster, whether large-scale or small, underscores our ongoing vulnerability and the crucial need for response plans that address the health and well being of those who confront disaster on a daily basis. In the Line of Fire speaks directly to these emergency response workers as well as to the mental health professionals who provide them with services, the administrators who support their efforts, and the family members who wonder if their loved one will return home safely from work tonight.

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Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers

Author: Steven Mintz

The decades before the Civil War saw the first secular efforts in history to remake society through reform. Reformers launched unprecedented campaigns reform criminals and prostitutes, to educate the deaf and the blind, guarantee women's rights, and abolish slavery. Our modern systems of free public schools, prisons, and hospitals for the mentally ill are all legacies of this era. Moralists and Modernizers tells the fascinating story of America's first age of reform -- combining incisive portraits of leading reformers and movements with perceptive analysis of religion, politics, and society.

Arguing that the reform impulse grew out of the era's peculiar mix of fear and hope, Steven Mintz shows that reform arose not only from fears of social disorder, family fragmentation, and widening class divisions, but also from a millennialist sense of possibility rooted in new religious and philosophical ideas. He then examines three distinct responses to pre-Civil War America's pressing social problems. Moral reform sought to create a Christian moral order using moral suasion. Social reform combatted poverty, crime, and ignorance through new institutions offering non-authoritarian forms of social control. Radical reform sought to regenerate American society by eliminating fundamental sources of inequality such as slavery and racial and sexual discrimination. In an epilogue, Mintz fits antebellum reform into the larger context of America's liberal tradition.

Mintz concludes that America's pre-Civil War reformers were at once moral critics and cultural modernizers. As exponents of a distinctly modern set of values, reformers attacked outmoded customs, smoothed the transition from apreindustrial to an industrial order, and devised modern bureaucratic systems of criminal justice, public education, and social welfare. The first comprehensive account antebellum reform to appear in twenty years, Moralists and Modernizers is a rich and rewarding work of synthesis and interpretation which draws upon the most recent historical research.

"This book charts a middle ground between those who regard reform as a form of class-based social control and those who stress reformers' benevolent intentions. It emphasizes the duality of antebellum reform, which blended impulses toward social and moral uplift with impulses to impose new codes of personal conduct, shape character, and construct new institutions of social control." -- from Moralists and Modernizers

Booknews

Mintz (history, U. of Houston) chronicles America's first age of social reform with profiles of leading reformers and movements and analyses of religion, politics, and society. He examines moral reform, social reform, and radical reform as distinct responses to the country's pre-Civil War social problems, and concludes that reformers were both moral critics and cultural modernizers who smoothed the transition from a preindustrial to an industrial order. Paper edition (unseen), $13.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Editor's Foreword
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
Ch. 1	The Specter of Social Breakdown	3
Ch. 2	The Promise of the Millennium	16
Ch. 3	Making the United States a Christian Republic: The Politics of Virtue	50
Ch. 4	The Science of Doing Good: Creating Crucibles of Moral Character	79
Ch. 5	Breaking the Bonds of Corrupt Custom	117
	Epilogue: Antebellum Reform and the American Liberal Tradition	154
	Bibliographical Essay	157
	Index	173