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2 books match the query 'Wrongful death'

cover of The Baneberry Disaster: A Generation of Atomic Fallout

The Baneberry Disaster

A Generation of Atomic Fallout

Larry C. Johns

University of Nevada Press, 2017

The Baneberry Disaster covers the calamitous December 1970 Baneberry underground nuclear test that pumped nearly 7 million curies of radiation into the atmosphere, caused the suspension of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site for six months, and whose radioactive cloud exposed 86 test-site workers to radiation, two of whom died of leukemia less than four years later.
 
The authors are attorneys from Las Vegas who spent 25 years pursuing a lawsuit for the victims at Baneberry. The story begins in 1971, just after the Baneberry test vented, and takes the reader through the years leading up to the trial, the 41-day trial in 1979, and the multiple appeals following the trial. It discusses the claims and lawsuits filed by others exposed to atomic testing, and the congressional investigations that led to the enactment of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990.
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cover of Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life

Writing with Fire

The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life

Barbara Young Welke

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A cultural and legal history intertwined with a deeply emotional meditation on the course of life, memory, and the documents that define us.

During the 1940s and 1950s, an untold number of American children suffered devastating injuries when the fur-like fabric on the chaps of their Gene Autry–branded cowboy playsuits exploded into flame. Barbara Young Welke was researching this history when her teenage daughter unexpectedly died.

The shock of Welke’s loss transformed her understanding of the children and their families. Her experience also led her to question the norms of scholarship and of writing. Historians are trained to separate the personal from the intellectual, to be suspicious of emotion. These and other norms are embedded in and reinforced by the calling card of academics, the curriculum vitae. Welke wondered how that cold document—with its literal meaning, “the course of life”—had become a form that excludes so much of what gives life meaning. What impact did that have on what we know, how we know it, and how we understand ourselves? Similarly, Welke wondered, what might we see if we looked at the history of the cowboy suit tragedy as more than a matter of lawsuits brought by grieving families? Here, Welke traces the making, marketing, and selling of the cowboy suits; the lengths the defendants went to avoid and limit liability; and the meaning of the injuries, deaths, and legal settlements in the course of these children’s and families’ lives.

Writing with Fire interweaves the histories of the cowboy suit tragedy and the curriculum vitae. Grounded in archival and legal research, oral histories, and letters Welke wrote her daughter following her death, Welke offers an inimitable examination of trauma, law, autobiography, and identity. The result is revelatory and unforgettable: a provocative historical reflection on life and death, depression and war, markets and families, law, power, and precarity in modern America.

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