The City That Care Forgot: The Roots, Ruin, and Rebirth of New Orleans

Catalog description

This is an interdisciplinary honors course taught from historical, cultural,and sociological perspectives. It will revisit the week of August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans and the wider Gulf Coast region. Our goal is to understand what unfolded during those days and during the subsequent weeks and months, linking those events to the city's storied past and still uncertain future. The course will focus on how human inaction transformed a natural disaster into an ongoing socioeconomic, political, and humanitarian catastrophe. During the course, we will uncover specific lessons that can be gleaned from Katrina using a variety of disciplinary/intellectual perspectives, including public policy, urban planning, levee engineering, hurricane science, environmental protection, as well as local, regional, and national history, economics, politics, and social structure. (Students will receive credit for only one of the following courses: ANT, BLS, HSP, or SOC 3120H. These courses may substitute for each other in the F-replacement policy.)