Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 by Andy Horowitz

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 by Andy Horowitz Josiah Rector Katrina: A History, 1915–2015. By Andy Horowitz. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 281. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-97171-4.) Over the past fifteen years, historical scholarship on Hurricane Katrina has been largely confined to stand-alone chapters, prefaces, epilogues, and postscripts. [End Page 752] Historians Ari Kelman, Richard M. Mizelle Jr., and Christopher Morris, legal scholars Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer, and geographer Craig E. Colten have written excellent books on the overlapping environmental histories of the Mississippi River and New Orleans, some of which include chapters on Katrina. Douglas Brinkley has written a narrative account of the storm that includes little historical background. Clyde Woods’s posthumously published Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (Athens, Ga., 2017) includes two brilliant chapters that situate Katrina in the history of “oil regimes” (chap. 7) and “planned abandonment” (chap. 8) in New Orleans. With Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, Andy Horowitz fills an outstanding gap in this literature, giving us the first sustained investigation of the 2005 storm’s historical origins and consequences. Horowitz’s narrative begins with the 1915 New Orleans Hurricane, because although the city had suffered ninety-two hurricanes since 1718, “the new neighborhoods developed after that [1915] storm experienced the worst flooding in 2005” (p. 3). Conducting a careful investigation of how this outcome came about, and what it meant over the next decade, he persuasively argues that the “causes and consequences” of disasters “stretch across much longer periods of time and space than we commonly imagine” (p. 3). In Part 1, Horowitz takes the reader from the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 to August 2005. A central player in chapter 1 is Leander Perez, the flagrantly corrupt and racist district attorney in Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes between 1924 and 1960. As Horowitz shows, the segregationist and antiregulatory strains of states’ rights ideology were seamlessly integrated in regional politics, contributing to long-term patterns of racial inequality and environmental unsustainability. Chapter 2 focuses on Hurricane Betsy, which flooded over six thousand homes in the Lower Ninth Ward in 1965. With uncanny parallels to Katrina, the federal, state, and local government response to Betsy privileged whites over African Americans and homeowners over rent-ers. Chapter 3 charts how the New Deal’s housing policies, and later the National Flood Insurance Program, subsidized white homeownership in flood-prone neighborhoods and how reckless canal projects and foot-dragging by the Army Corps of Engineers left New Orleans with an unfinished levee system ill-equipped to withstand storm surges. Part 2 examines the storm and its reverberations. In chapters 4 and 5, Horowitz explains how decades of background causes came together with the contingent events of Katrina to produce far more destruction and suffering in 2005–2015 than was necessary. Many of the outrages he describes here—the incompetence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency; the inequities of public housing demolition, hospital closure, and school charterization; the profiteering by private contractors—are well known, but he casts them in an illuminating historical context that presentist accounts lack. Horowitz is a gifted storyteller with a sharp eye for irony and apt quotations, and he has conducted painstaking archival research. If I have one criticism, it is that in arguing that disaster capitalism literature is ahistorical, he overstates the case. The authors he cites do not describe a “sudden turn toward capitalist practice” but an opportunistic removal of restraints on capital (p. 147). Who could disagree that “[c]apitalism did not blow into the city with the storm” [End Page 753] (p. 147)? That minor point aside, this book is the best published history of Katrina. It is a major contribution to urban history, environmental history, and disaster studies, with relevance far beyond southern Louisiana. Josiah Rector University of Houston Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association