Chicago Heat Wave: Individual Meanings

After reading the interview with Eric Klinenberg, the foundation of the history class was a pressing thought in my mind. I continuously thought of how history, and the capacity of historical events is completely dependent on the source at which is receiving and retelling it, making history a total compilation of different individual thoughts, perspectives, and recordings. In the interview, many questions were asked along the lines of how was Chicago during the heat wave, and how did people deal with it, and how many people were immensely effected by such a disaster. His answers were consistently answered in two different parts: both from two contrasting and opposing perspectives. Particularly, in this event, social class and economic standing was a clear contributor to the capacity of the disaster, so her divided up his responses with different recording of people who were emerged in different economic conditions. Consequentially, those in poor economic standing and conditions were extremely more devastated and impacted by the heat wave, whereas the people in the higher class and richer economic conditions saw a less prevalent effects on their lives. The exponential difference between such classes obviously made the disastrous environmental catastrophe escalade to higher heights, as the contrast made developed into a bigger disaster than the nature itself. Regardless, the review of the disaster was drastically different based solely off of the individual who is explaining it. The interviewee told of the large amount of suffering senior citizens who, in retrospect, were not especially wealthy and in such good standing. Therefore, they didn’t have the options and the resources that were available to others, leading to a calamitous ending for such individuals in the lower class. Meanwhile, people in higher economic standing had a much smoother (still rough, but better) and sufficient experience when it comes to the heat wave. With them, they had the money, resources, choices, and fallbacks by which they could utilize in order to accompany and sustain their lives in such a catastrophic time period. The explanations and recordings of the individuals who had more money and options available to them were an improvement to the ones from the poorer levels of society. This difference relates to how we need to approach history by historiography, in opposition to merely accepting and applying the details and information revealed without recognizing potential biases and misconceptions of the truth and actual happenings. The interview of a dispersed individual in the Chicago Heat Wave of 1995 is an ideal example to prove such a point, as it serves as evidence that two descriptions of the same event can (and usually are) significantly different, and cannot be understood and applied to the same extent. We can do two things with the presented contrasting information. One, we can use the difference between the sources to understand important issues, separations, and characteristics of the society at the time, and apply such findings to understand the core of the sources, and answer the question why it is written like it is. Then, we can understand (a little better) the differences and take the firm information that is presented without distractions and misunderstandings from such a source. The Heat Wave interview perfectly demonstrates how history is the analysis of different perspectives of an event, as the heat wave was a completely different scenario all depending on (in this case) the social and economic standing of the individual.