When the levees surrounding New Orleans collapsed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many observers regarded the catastrophe as extraordinary: a disaster without precedent that was somehow unique to that time and place. But looking back through the dystopian fog of the pandemic and the climate crisis, Katrina now seems to herald a possible future for 21st century America writ large. Drawing from his Bancroft Prize-winning book Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, historian Andy Horowitz traces Katrina’s causes and consequences across a century, considering the questions that New Orleans’s history gives rise to about race, class, community, trauma, inequality, the welfare state, extractive industry, metropolitan development, and environmental change in America’s future.

Andy Horowitz is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and also serves as the Connecticut State Historian. His research is concerned with creating a usable past for the climate crisis: he writes histories designed to help readers think through problems that are often imagined to be without precedent. He is the author of Katrina: A History (Harvard University Press, 2020), which won a Bancroft Prize in American History, and was named the Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, and he has published essays in The Atlantic, Time, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times.