Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina touched down in the Gulf Coast region of the United States. This massive storm left in its wake death, destruction, and human suffering on a scale and scope that will no doubt make it one of the largest social catastrophes of twenty-first-century American urban history. This disaster soon ignited widespread popular and academic debates over domestic policies dealing with questions of race and class, individual and government responsibility and accountability, and the relationship among society, technology, and the environment. Yet what is too often absent from such discussions are systematic historical perspectives on the role of human decisions in shaping the outcome of so-called “natural disasters.” Accordingly, this essay explores overlapping developments in U.S. and African American urban, social, and environmental history and underscores the significance of history for advancing contemporary debates about the meaning of Katrina and the future of New Orleans and the Gulf States.

Keywords

African Americans environmental history New Orleans class race

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

David Worster , "Transformation of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History," Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (March 1990 ): 1089.

Ibid., 1092.

Christine M. Rosen and Joel Tarr, eds., "The Environment and the City" (special issue), Journal of Urban History 20, no. 3 (May 1994): 299-310. For a similar effort to bring the study of technology within the framework of urban history, see Mark H. Rose and Joel A. Tarr, eds., "Technology and the City" (special issue), Journal of Urban History 25, no. 3 (March 1999): 315-20.

Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll, eds., "To Love the Wind and the Rain": African Americans and Environmental History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 1-8; Bruce Sinclair, ed., Technology and the African American Experience: Needs and Opportunities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 1-17. For insight into the environmental justice movement and African Americans, see studies by Robert D. Bullard, ed., Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston, MA: South End, 1993); and Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000).

Andrew Hurley , Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995).

See Joe W. Trotter, Earl Lewis, and Tera W. Hunter, African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1-20; Darlene Clark Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); August Meier and Eliott Rudwick, eds., Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

Trotter et al., African American Urban Experience, 5-12.

Ibid.

William L. Waugh, Jr., ed., "Shelter from the Storm: Repairing the National Emergency System after Hurricane Katrina" (special issue), Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604 (March 2006): 6-25. For a popular account of Katrina, see Michael Eric Dyson , Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York: Basic/Civitas Books, 2006).

10.

Clarence L. Mohr , "Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue," OAH Newsletter 35 (May 2007), 1-2. Also see Clarence L. Mohr and Lawrence N. Powell , eds., "Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue? " (special issue), Journal of American History 94, no. 3 (December 2007), and Jeremy I. Levitt and Matthew C. Whitaker, ed., Hurrican Katrina: America's Unnatural Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), pp. 1-21.