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Abstract
In 1927, in the small township of Bath, Michigan, Andrew P. Kehoe planted more than 600 pounds of dynamite and pyrotol in Bath Consolidated School. The explosions killed 45 people, including 38 children, and injured dozens more. The Bath disaster remains the deadliest act of school violence in the United States, yet many Americans have never heard of it or of Kehoe. This event, while remembered by Bath residents, has been largely ignored by national media – rarely publicly acknowledged, recognized, or memorialized. The Bath disaster contradicts the misconception that school mass murders are a modern phenomenon.
This dissertation explores era and subsequent news coverage of the Bath disaster, as well as memory sites, via both historic media and archives, in an attempt to understand media’s role in collective memory of the Bath tragedy of 1927. It considers how coverage of this early disaster might fit into the overall press narrative of mass murders in schools. A combination of media behavior, the tendency of traumatic memory to silence survivors, and other events and characteristics of the era ultimately proved potent in creating a lasting atmosphere of collective forgetting of the Bath disaster.
This dissertation explores era and subsequent news coverage of the Bath disaster, as well as memory sites, via both historic media and archives, in an attempt to understand media’s role in collective memory of the Bath tragedy of 1927. It considers how coverage of this early disaster might fit into the overall press narrative of mass murders in schools. A combination of media behavior, the tendency of traumatic memory to silence survivors, and other events and characteristics of the era ultimately proved potent in creating a lasting atmosphere of collective forgetting of the Bath disaster.