Katrina/Library Search

HURRICANE KATRINA

A secondary source exercise

In the decade since Hurricane Katrina, there has been a tremendous amount of research on the anthropogenic causes of the storm, the ways the urban settlement patterns of the city affected whose homes were most badly damaged, and the ways race and class continue to affect the redevelopment of the city.

In this exercise, you will:

1) use your newfound library search skills to locate journal articles, books, newspaper articles, and government documents in order to...

2) answer the questions below, using proper citations to attribute all the information in your answers. Then you will...

3) compile a bibliography that has the required number of documents cited with the correct citation formats. (For this exercise, we will use AAA format).

PART I

Answer the questions below. Your citations should be in the following format: (Author Date:Page). In cases where there is no page number (e.g., for a newspaper article on the web), just use the date alone.

Examples: Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on the evening of August 23, 2005, and flooded over 80% of the city (Dunn 2010:14). The failure of the levees surrounding New Orleans is considered the worst civil engineering disaster in American history (Smith 2008).

1. Did human activity contribute to the severity of the storm, or was it an entirely natural disaster? Support your answer with evidence and citations.

2. How did social and political decisions made before Katrina change the way the storm affected the city? Cite your sources.

3. How did the storm affect people in different locations in the city differently? Why were the people in each location where they were? Who was able to evacuate and who was not? Support your answer with specific data and cite your sources.

4. How did the US government handle the crisis caused by the storm? What measures were successful and which were not? Cite your sources.

5. How has the reconstruction of New Orleans changed the racial and income disparities in the city? Is vulnerability to natural disaster still a concern for some groups of people more than others? Use specific examples and be sure to give a citation for each piece of data.

PART II.

References aren't just an exercise designed to try the patience of writers. They are like addresses or road directions: they tell readers where to go to check information or to get more information. For this exercise, you will need to provide a list of references cited in your answers. I will go looking for them, and see if I can find them using your directions! Although more references are better and will be graded more highly, your reference list must contain at least:

a) 2 scholarly journal articles

b) 1 government document

c) 1 newspaper article

d) 1 book (or a chapter in a book).

You can use the citations below as a model for how you need to present your citation. I will grade the bibliography on correctness of format and completeness of information. If you have more questions about how to format a citation, check out the AAA style guide at http://www.aaanet.org/publications/style_guide.pdf.

1. Single authored book:

Castles, Stephen

1990 Here for Good. London: Pluto Press

2. Book with multiple authors:

Bonacich, Edna, and John Modell

1975 The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.

3. Journal article: (note the volume and issue numbers as well as page numbers!)

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen

2012 The Chaos of Humanitarianism: Adhocracy in the Republic of Georgia. Humanity 3(1):1-23.

4. Newspaper article (with page numbers from physical edition, where possible)

Reinhold, Robert

2000 Illegal Aliens Hoping to Claim Their Dreams. New York Times, November 3: A1, A10.

5. Newspaper article (with URL)

Choe Sang Hun

2014. Two Koreas Exchange Fire. New York Times, October 6. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/world/asia/two-koreas-exchange-fire-at-sea-border.html?ref=world. Accessed October 6, 2014.

6. Government Document

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

1995. Home Safety Tips: You Can Keep Your Baby Safe. Washington: Government Printing Office.