Reconstructing the American South – After Katrina
Jim Downs finds that the reasons the Federal government was slow to respond to Hurricane Katrina are rooted in the South’s racial and economic history, and wonders if the catastrophe may lead at last to genuine Reconstruction.
The chaos that struck the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane season has created a stir among American historians. Some have looked back to the trail of devastation left by other major hurricanes in the twentieth century, and have even drawn parallels with natural disasters such as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Some, making comparisons with historical events that are unrelated to natural disaster or environmental destruction, have pointed to the possibility of Hurricane Katrina igniting a social movement similar to the labor strikes of the early twentieth century and the Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1960s. Yet others have argued that there is little historical precedent for what is unfolding in Mississippi, Louisiana and, more recently, Texas, and that a new mode of analysis and framework is required to situate these events.
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