© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Shaped by Risk: The American Fire Insurance Industry, 1790–1920
DALIT BARANOFF is adjunct professor in the Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park. Contact information: 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742–7315, USA. E-mail: baranoff@umd.edu.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Late last nightWhile we were all in bed
Mrs. O’Leary left a lantern in the shed
And when the cow kicked it over
She winked her eye and said
There’ll be a hot time
In the old town tonight
FIRE, FIRE, FIRE
Parody of a popular song1
Whatever role Mrs. O’Leary’s cow might have had in starting the Great Chicago Fire of October 8–9, 1871, the legend is one of the few remaining popular associations with the conflagration that destroyed much of the city.2 The age of the great urban fires, of which Chicago’s is the most storied, ended nearly a century ago with the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. By then, major fires had ravaged New York (1835), Boston (1872), Baltimore (1904), and many smaller cities, destroying hundreds of millions of dollars in property.
Today, it is nearly inconceivable that a fire might rage out of
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Risk and Uncertainty |
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The Need for Systematic Risk Management |
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Business Historians and Risk |
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Managing Risk in the Fire Insurance Industry |
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