Professors Lawrence J. Vale, Thomas Kochan, and J. Phillip Thompson discuss issues related to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the recovery of New Orleans. Vale looks at past urban disasters and how these cities have changed and recovered; Kochan contrasts Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to Pearl Harbor with Bush's to Katrina; and Thompson looks at racial tension in New Orleans, prior to and after the hurricane.
Dr. Kent Germany, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, argues that the rise of suburbs and the decline of the inner city factored into the larger struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s and set up the conditions exposed by Hurricane Katrina.
This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the social situation in the South prior to the Civil War, in which white society was divided between the wealthy class known as the Planter Aristocracy, and the poor yeoman farmers of the backcountry.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the results of the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s: one million people died, and another 1.5 million emigrated, mostly to the United States. These immigrants became reliant on the Catholic Church.
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Anti-immigration feelings are captured in an 1891 cartoon that highlights Jewish and Italian immigration. Cartoon historian Josh Brown of the American Social History Project explains.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the post-Civil-War boom for Southern cities like Atlanta, GA, and Chattanooga, TN, as railway and factory jobs replace jobs on the farm.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes "Nativism," or the resentment of foreigners, which revived in the late 19th century as greater numbers of new immigrant groups arrived in America.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, after the Civil War, some southern blacks left farms for new jobs in factories, but quickly realized that working conditions were poor and the pay was worse.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, after the Civil War, a group of influential southerners promoted a vision and some said a myth about a "New South" that would be competitive with the north.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, when Union troops left the South in 1877, most white Southerners believed their economic situation would improve. However, poor whites were not much better off than freed slaves.
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