Elizabeth Hayes Turner is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston.

"This highly readable account reveals how significantly the effects of natural disaster can shape the relationship among politics, gender, and culture. An important contribution to women's history, southern history, and urban history."--CHOICE"Scholars of many disciplines will find this work a valuable tool. It is thought-provoking, scholarly, and informative, and the summaries at the end of each chapter prove invaluable...Turner is to be commended for the depth of her research and her significant contribution to the field of history."--Catholic Southwest"Women, Culture and Community...is well-written and well-organized. The opening chapter is spellbinding as the disaster unfolds. Turner then recreates the role of women in Galveston prior to and after the storm by methodically tracing their importance to Galveston society."--Southwestern Historical Quarterly"Elizabeth Hayes Turner has produced a thoroughly researched and gracefully written study of women's activism in Progressive-era Galveston, Texas...(H)er work offers an instructive caution against the easy formulas that too often mask the complex ways in which women and men make their history."--The Journal of Southern History"This is a book that should appeal to a wide audience in the universities--it is women's history, urban history, church history, Gilded Age history, Progressive Era history, African-American history. And best of all, it is smart history. Its author is not afraid to speculate, but she always makes clear when she is musing and her speculations rest so solidly on evidence that the reader is prepared to nod in agreement."--Georgia Historical Quarterly"[F]inely researched...Some of the most interesting and original parts of Turner's book reveal women who went against type. Her fascinating portrait of the United Daughters of the Confederacy shows them playing a leading role implanting the 'true' version of southern history in school curricula."--American Historical Review"An informative and insightful case study of the evolution of women's public and political activism in Galveston, an important gateway to the West. Turner's examination of life in the port city before and after the 1900 storm focuses on the responses of the inhabitants who rebuilt Galveston as the organizational fervor of the Progressive Era spread thruoghout the nation's cities, and as minority groups, especially people of color, were forced out of politicsand into segregated spaces...Women, Culture, and Community offers a range of provocative insights and new material for understanding Progressive Era reforms movements."--New Mexico Historical Review