(Almost) A Closer Walk with Thee Historical Reflections on New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina

This article was never intended to be an analytical treatment of Hurricane Katrina's impact on the New Orleans metropolitan area. It was, from the start, an opportunistic effort to bring a historian's powers of observation to bear on a catastrophic event sure to have life-altering effects for generations. Finding myself an unwilling participant-observer, I attempted to record what I saw and thought as Katrina killed more than a thousand people, displaced many times that many, and flattened a land mass the size of Great Britain. I looked, at all times, for the nexus of structure and agency, for the conjunction of the natural and the confected, and for the point at which New Orleans' unique history intersected with this singular event.