Arwen P. Mohun’s Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society is the best synthetic history yet written about ideas of risk and attempts to control it, especially technological risk, in the United States. Its panoramic scope traces this theme from the Colonial period to roughly the 1980s. Since the publication of Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society in 1992, the topic has been popular, even faddish, resulting in an enormous literature. Any scholar who steps into a good research library and visits the multiple book cases dedicated to risk will likely experience the tremulous, anxious shivers of information overload. In many ways, Mohun’s work is a culmination of this thrust, drawing not only on history but also on the current state of the art in other fields, especially psychology. This book feels like the end of an era. Business history and the history of risk are deeply interwoven. Firms managed dangerous workplaces, manufactured hazardous products, and produced solutions to problems (e.g., lightning rods, fire escapes). Consequently, business historians will find much to admire and learn in Mohun’s text.

In Mohun’s hand, risk is usually an analytical category, not one belonging to actors. That is, many, perhaps most, of Mohun’s historical characters would not have often used the word “risk” to describe their experiences. Some more explicit attention to when risk was an actors’ category would have been helpful. So what is risk? Mohun defines it as a “capacious term, used to describe the uncertainties (usually negative) that arise from all kinds of activities, including the financial, political, and social” (6). She focuses on “threats of physical harm: threats to the body and, to a lesser extent, property.” This focus means that she largely sets aside the history of financial risk, the subject of other works, including Jonathan Levy’s Freaks of Fortune (2012).

Risk is divided into three parts on nature, industry, and consumer society, and this division reflects an historical argument about the changing nature of risk management. It began first with attempts to master the hazards of nature. Mohun’s first four chapters, in turn, address fire, disease, weather, and nonhuman animals, especially horses. Individuals and groups then attempted to deal with the hazards that accompanied production and other industrial activities, and they did so through professionalization. Chapters 5–7 describe railroad accidents, the emergence of risk professionals, and the rise of the Safety-First Movement. Finally, lawmakers, public administrators, insurance executives, and safety advocates came to focus on the risks that consumers bore. The last four chapters cover automobiles, guns, amusement parks, and the consumer product safety movement.

Mohun’s greatest interest is the tension between elite, or expert, ideas of risk and—what she calls—“vernacular risk culture”: a “set of rules, customs, and beliefs … generated in the course of everyday activities,” which “passed informally from person to person, reinforced through the authority of experience and social status” (1). Her conception of risk thinkers is broad. Her chapter on disease features Cotton Mather, an early advocate of inoculation, pondering Divine Providence and self-care in facing risks.

Fitting this interest in the expert and the vernacular, Mohun’s chapters have an almost dialectical quality. Time and again, a particular hazard—like railroad accidents—became a public problem. Reformers proposed solutions, either a technological fix or one focused on training or a mixture of the two. Then others resisted them. If the solutions were aimed at reforming corporations, business executives combated them. If they were directed at changing work practices, then laborers disputed them.

Mohun finds repeatedly that male workers’ conceptions of self-mastery and masculinity led them to shrug off suggestions and rules focused on safety. In this vein, Mohun does a superb job attending to the experiences of working-class laborers, women, and minorities. Women, children, and nonwhites bore the brunt of technological risk throughout this history. Consumers also contested rules and technological fixes meant to keep them and others safe. Mohun details wonderful examples of resistance, such as when lawnmower users tie up the “deadman’s lever,” which turns off the mower in an emergency, so that they don’t have to hold on to it constantly. When writing about workers and consumers, Mohun reminds us often that American culture, as much as it has tried to control risk, also celebrates and craves risk taking, whether through racing trains, speeding cars, or riding on rollercoasters. Mohun’s approach is only almost dialectical because there is no final synthesis, where everything comes together and resistance falls away. The world she paints is our world, which typically remains mired in complexity and imperfect solutions.

At times, Mohun’s argument seems functionalist, wherein changing circumstances lead to new behavior. For instance, she writes, “The overwhelming violence” of modern “machines and the complexity of systems required a different approach” (4, italics mine). But Mohun avoids this pitfall by emphasizing individuals’ and groups’ agency in creating ideas and actions. As she writes, “New ideas, not new types of hazards, led to … transformations in how people attempted to reduce their exposure to harm” (3). These new ideas took many forms, from the rise of statistical risk thinking around inoculation in the eighteenth century to new methods and technologies for managing railroads in the late nineteenth century, from the creation of factory inspectors and other risk professionals during the Progressive Era to Ralph Nader’s insistence, beginning in the 1960s, that corporations should use the best-available science to protect consumers.

One of Risk’s greatest potentials is as a text for undergraduate courses. Put more bluntly, I believe that this book should become a standard text for a long time. I have used parts of the book in two such courses—one on the history of disasters, the other on automotive history—and both times students took to it immediately. The book is so clearly written that even young students understand it and are able to engage its ideas, which, in the end, are fairly sophisticated. In many ways and many contexts, Mohun’s Risk is a gift.