The story spoken about in this book has a personal meaning to me. One of the most enduring memories from my adolescence consists of watching the 14th Street ConEd station blow up from my apartment, followed by weeks of trekking forty blocks uptown to buy any food that wasn’t spoiled. I remember watching cars half-submerged during the worst of the storm, and finding them moved by the force of the water the day after. Superstorm Sandy was a seminal moment for a lot of people, but while my story and that of so many others in Lower Manhattan or Jersey City has been well-trod, other (often more evocative) stories sometimes end up forgotten or downplayed.
Abby Perkiss’ oral history Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore is a gripping and often harrowing look at the Bayshore, a community forgotten in the aftermath of one of the US’s most destructive storms. Over the course of seventy interviews, her book explores topics including the importance of social media to disaster relief, inadequacies of disaster prep at the local, state, and federal levels, the grassroots community rebuilding efforts, and the long-term effects of the storm. It is an excellent example not only of history from below, but also how to engage with crisis history.
The object here – and one that dovetails nicely with prevailing oral history theories, eg. Lynn – is to build history from the bottom up, and ensure that these communities are remembered. As demonstrated in the book, attention often fell on areas outside of the Bayshore, and even within this community the fickle nature of social media meant that there was an uneven distribution of both disaster relief and media coverage. Sandy has since become a major talking point, both as a major disaster and as a wakeup call for politicians and climate activists. However, as Perkiss notes, “These birds-eye political debates and policy decisions capture headlines, individual voices often get lost. This book recovers those voices.”1 Without the work done by Perkiss and her students, many of these harrowing individual stories would never have seen the light of day.
One thing I found interesting is the immediacy of the oral history. The first interviews were conducted as early as March of 2013, only a few months after the superstorm ripped through the Bayshore. While the interviews themselves were clearly done with a lot of empathy and ethical consideration in mind, there is a lot to consider. For one, answers – is the emotional rawness of so recent an event a bonus to the oral history, or does it detract from the oral author’s accurate retelling of events? As oral history is considered in large part a study of memory, and inaccuracy is expected, this is not necessarily a problem – but it does bear remembering. Additionally, are there any ethical considerations to be had when interviewing recent victims of a tragedy? Many of these people had just lived through what may be the most stressful ordeal of their lives – I am curious to know how Perkiss navigated that.
Still, Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore is a valuable example of how to conduct an oral history while both making a concrete point and respecting the time and agency of one’s interviewees. If oral history’s objective is history from below, to uncover previously ignored stories from a subaltern (sort of, in this case?) perspective, then Perkiss and her students succeeded beautifully.
- Perkiss, viii ↩︎
Discussion Questions:
- How did you handle the difficulties of immediacy? Were there any complications involved with interviewing people about such a recent tragedy, and how did you deal with them if so?
- You mention that Brittany Le Strange and Mary Piasecki, two students local to the area, were the ones who spearheaded the effort to find interviewees. How were they chosen, and was it difficult to find people willing to talk about the disaster?
- What was the initial reaction of local people to the project? Did you see a lot of enthusiasm, or was there pushback?
- If you had to revisit this project in 2025, who would you be most curious to speak to? What would you ask?
- Is there anything you would have done different, either in your interviews or in the construction of the book?