Storm Recasts Study of Gulf Coast

Though academics who research New Orleans culture and history say they believe Hurricane Katrina did not destroy evidence important in their work, the hurricane may change the way their research will be received by the scholarly community.

Diana Williams ’95, a graduate student in the History of American Civilizations at Harvard, is finishing her dissertation on interracial marriage in New Orleans. Williams, who focuses primarily on the Civil War and Reconstruction era, uses Louisiana court records, many of which are stored in the basement of the New Orleans Public Library.

“Those are the records that were most useful for doing research from the bottom up,” Williams said.

While there was initial uncertainty about whether the records would be damaged by the pervasive flooding, Williams said the papers on which her research is based remained dry.

What’s more, Williams and other scholars say they think research showing the city’s population “from the bottom up” may have a more understanding audience now, since the hurricane has served to expose present-day social differences in the city.

“A crisis peels away the veil that often covers the inequities in a society. And that’s what this hurricane has done. It’s peeled away the screen that hid the poverty of the ninth ward from people who went down on spring break to Bourbon Street,” said University of Michigan Professor of History and Professor of Law Rebecca Scott ’71.

Williams said she thinks the peeling away of social layers may help people to appreciate the work she has done on similar issues in history.

“Insofar as my work attempts to expose the grim realities behind New Orleans’ glitzy facade, I think now it will meet less resistance than I previously feared it would,” she said. “People around the world are finally addressing the fact that there is nothing particularly romantic or fun about New Orleans’ desperate poverty and social inequalities. I don’t think they’re going to be able to forget about it for a while. The next Mardi Gras is going to be a lot more subdued.”

­—­Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu