Drawing on legal cases, legal debates, and fiction including works by James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Charles Chesnutt, Nan Goodman investigates changing notions of responsibility and agency in nineteenth-century America. By looking at accidents and accident law in the industrializing society, Goodman shows how courts moved away from the doctrine of strict liability to a new notion of liability that emphasized fault and negligence.

Shifting the Blame reveals the pervasive impact of this radically new theory of responsibility in understandings of industrial hazards, in manufacturing dangers, and in the stories that were told and retold about accidents.