The compelling story of a man-made disaster amid the tensions of the early twentieth century. Shortly after noon on January 15, 1919, a fifty-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed on
Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a fifteen-foot-high wave of molasses that briefly traveled at thirty-five miles per hour. When the tide receded, a section of the city's North End had been transformed into a war zone. The Great Boston Molasses Flood claimed the lives of twenty-one people and scores of animals, injured 150, and caused widespread destruction. But the molasses flood was more than an isolated event. Its story overlays America's story during a tumultuous decade in our history. Tracing the era from the tank's construction in 1915 through the multiyear lawsuit that followed the tragedy,
Dark Tide uses the drama of the flood to examine the sweeping changes brought about by World War I,
Prohibition, the
Anarchist movement, the
Red Scare, immigration, and the role of big business in society.
Click for the original review.
Background Information
Boston was founded by Puritans soon after their arrival at Massachusetts Bay and is the largest city in New England. Prohibition was the social experiment in the abolition of the human consumption of intoxicating alcohol between 1919 and 1933. The Red Scare was a domestic response to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russian, bred out of fear that communism would spread to America. Anarchists believe that the best government is no government at all.
