The Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina, under whose auspices I embarked on this project, provides access to the full transcripts and audio of these interviews online. I am grateful to Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and the staff of the SOHP for their ongoing support of my work. I am grateful as well to Kai Erikson, Glenda Gilmore, Doug Kysar, Kate Dudley, Ruthie Yow, Talya Zemach-Bersin, and members of the Louisiana Folklore Society, the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, and the Yale Ethnography and Oral History Working Group for their enormously helpful comments on drafts of this essay.
- Karen Hopkins, interview by Andy Horowitz, July 13, 2010, interview R-0495, transcript, 19, Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (henceforth referred to as SOHP Collection).
- Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President to the Nation on the BP Oil Spill,” June 15, 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-nation-bp-oil-spill; National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling (Washington, D.C., 2011); Historians of disasters have tended to write what Lawrence Powell calls “instant history.” See Powell, “What Does American History Tell Us about Katrina and Vice Versa?” Journal of American History 94 (December 2007): 876.
- Rick Jervis, “In the Gulf: Lives Forever in Recovery,” USA Today, June 18, 2010.
- Hopkins, July 13, 2010, 13–14.
- Cherri Foytlin, interview by Andy Horowitz, July 6, 2010, interview R-0494, transcript, 15, SOHP Collection.
- Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1994), 20.
- Jake Halpern, Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 168–210.
- Hopkins, July 13, 2010, 12; “The first thing that makes oral history different,” Alessandro Portelli has written, “is that it tells us less about events than about their meaning.” Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 50; “With words,” Keith H. Basso suggests, a “physical presence” can be “fashioned into a meaningful human universe.” Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 40; Hopkins, July 13, 2010, 30; Ibid.
- Board of Levee Commissioners, Orleans Levee District, “Report of Levee Examining Committee, Plaquemines Parish East Bank Levee District” (New Orleans, 1926), accessed in the Louisiana State Archives, Baton Rouge, LA. The Cemetery is “on the left bank of the Mississippi River, at a distance of about Sixty-five miles below the City of New Orleans.” See “Act of Donation by Narcise Cosse, Sr. to Board of Trustees for the Point Pleasant Cemetery,” July 23, 1921, copy in author’s possession.
- Philip Simmons, interview by Andy Horowitz, July 12, 2010, interview R-0498, transcript, 2–3, SOHP Collection; Richard M. Auty, Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The Resource Curse Thesis (New York: Routledge, 1993); Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); See F. D. Groves, et al., “Is there a ‘cancer corridor’ in Louisiana?” Journal of the Louisiana Medical Society 48 (April 1996): 155–165; Barbara Allen, Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003); United States Census Bureau, “Number and Percentage of People in Poverty in the Past 12 Months By State and Puerto Rico: 2010 and 2011,” 3, http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-01.pdf.
- Simmons, July 12, 2010, 10–11.
- Ibid., 17; Ibid., 12.
- Brady R. Couvillion, et al., “Land Area Change in Coastal Louisiana from 1932 to 2010,” U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Map 3164 (United States Geological Survey, 2011), 1.
- John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); Richard Campanella, Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2006); Richard T. Saucier, Recent Geomorphic History of the Pontchartrain Basin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963).
- Between 1884 and 2002, “the long-term average erosion rates for the Plaquemines barrier shoreline were –23.1 feet per year.” See Shea Penland, et al., “Changes in Louisiana’s Shoreline: 1855–2002,” Journal of Coastal Research 44 (Spring 2005): 33.
- “State, Corps consider opening Bonnet Carre Spillway to keep Gulf oil spill at bay,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 5, 2010, http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/state_corps_consider_opening_b.html.
- Simmons, July 12, 2010, 16.
- Jake Sherman, “Rick Perry: Oil spill may be ‘act of god,’” Politico, May 3, 2010, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36691.html; Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Hopkins, July 13, 2010, 25.
- Simmons, July 12, 2010, 15; Hopkins, July 13, 2010, 24; Acy Cooper, interview by Andy Horowitz, July 20, 2010, interview R-0493, transcript, 6, SOHP Collection.
- Foytlin, July 6, 2010, 21–22; Foytlin is Native American, and Native Americans’ history gives them plenty of reason to distrust the federal government, too. On how white southerners long “despised concentrated power,” see William Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 3; Simmons, July 12, 2010, 36–37.
- Kai T. Erikson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 256–259; Alan Lomax, “An Appeal for Cultural Equity” (1972). Reprinted in Ronald D. Cohen, ed., Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934–1997 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 285; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy (1942; George Allen & Unwin, 1976), 83; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848; Brooklyn Verso, 2012), 38; Amy Wold, “Washed Away,” The [Baton Rouge] Advocate, April 29, 2013, http://theadvocate.com/home/5782941-125/washed-away.
- The historian must be aware that nearly every generation in American history has perceived a decline in community cohesion. See Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978).
- “What has most distinguished American responses to destruction over the past three centuries or so,” writes Kevin Rozario, “is the widespread conviction, born of beliefs and experience, that calamities are instruments of progress.” Rozario, The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 20; Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964; New York: Penguin Classics edition, 2003), 83; Hopkins, July 13, 2010, 37–39.