Harvard University Press
Katrina: A History, 1915-2015
Key Metrics
- Andy Horowitz
- Harvard University Press
- Paperback
- 9780674271074
- -
- -
- History > United States - State & Local - South (AL,AR,FL,GA,KY,LA,MS,NC,SC,TN,VA,WV)
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year
The main thrust of Horowitz's account is to make us understand Katrina--the civic calamity, not the storm itself--as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature.
--Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker
Masterful...Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we're willing--and unwilling--to protect.
--Eric Klinenberg, New York Review of Books
If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one.
--Scott W. Stern, Los Angeles Review of Books
Horowitz rightly and trenchantly offers Katrina as an encapsulation of the big global challenges with which capitalism, racism, socio-economic inequality and global warming confront us all.
--Peter Coates, Times Literary Supplement
Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back almost a full century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing away from the high ground near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated.
The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers made it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than for Blacks. And he explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana's oil industry have been distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance--and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today.
Author Bio
Andy Horowitz specializes in modern American history. His research explores disasters and the questions they give rise to about race, class, community, trauma, inequality, the welfare state, metropolitan development, extractive industry, and environmental change.
He is the author of Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Harvard University press, 2020), Critical Disaster Studies, co-edited with Jacob Remes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), and served as guest editor for “Human/Nature,” a 2021 special issue of Southern Cultures. He also has published essays in The Atlantic, Time, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
Research Interests
Horowitz’s current research explores disasters and the questions they give rise to about race, class, community, trauma, inequality, the welfare state, metropolitan development, and environmental change. His first book, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Harvard University Press, 2020), traces Katrina’s causes and consequences across a century in order to demonstrate how the places we live, and the disasters that imperil them, are at once artifacts of state policy, cultural imagination, economic order, and environmental possibility.
Katrina won a 2021 Bancroft Prize in American History, and was named the 2021 Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and a 2020 Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Horowitz also co-edited Critical Disaster Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), which charts a course for the future of the field of disaster studies, and served as the guest editor for Human/Nature, a Spring 2021 special issue of the journal Southern Cultures focused on the environment.
His dissertation on the history of disaster in greater New Orleans won Yale’s George Washington Elgeston Prize for best dissertation in American history, and the Southern Historical Association’s C. Vann Woodward Prize for best dissertation in Southern history. Along with his academic writing, he has published essays in the Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Time, The Atlantic, and the New York Times.
Education
Ph.D., Yale University, 2014
Source: Tulane University
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