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Photograph of an African American woman standing on her front porch.

America’s Oldest Black Town Is Trapped Between Rebuilding and Retreating

In Princeville, what’s at stake is not just one town’s survival but a unique window into American history.
by Jake Bittle via Gizmodo on September 21, 2022
Rescue workers look through the roof of a submerged Rapid City house for flood victims on June 12, 1972.
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A Largely Forgotten Flood Ignited The Environmental Justice Movement

The Rapid City flood helped define pervasive environmental injustice and catalyze action.
by Stephen R. Hausmann via Made By History on June 9, 2022
Man walking though flood in Chicago

Redlined, Now Flooding

Maps of historic housing discrimination show how neighborhoods that suffered redlining in the 1930s face a far higher risk of flooding today.
by Kriston Capps, Christopher Cannon via Bloomberg on March 15, 2021

American Bottom

Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains.
by Walter Johnson via Boston Review on January 23, 2020
Spencer Dam destroyed by floodwaters.

The Missouri River Flood Hits a Historic Native American Homeland

In the wake of devastating floods, one writer reflects on the importance of place to Great Plains Indians.
by Ian Frazier via The New Yorker on April 3, 2019
View of mountains on the horizon

Who Owns the Mountains?

Hurricane Helene has revived urgent questions about the politics of land — and tourism — in Appalachia.
by Olivia Paschal via New York Review of Books on November 3, 2024
Debris from hurricane Helene.
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America Forgot a Crucial Lesson From Hurricanes of the Past

History reveals that even weakening storms do catastrophic damage when they hit mountainous regions.
by Justin McBrien via Made By History on October 9, 2024
Barges on the Mississippi River.

The Quixotic Struggle to Tame the Mighty Mississippi

An epic account of a vital economic artery and our many efforts to control it.
by Lina Tran via UnDark on June 28, 2024
Old picture of four Japanese American girls in Manzanar prison camp.

Preserving Memories of a Japanese Internment Camp

A poignant connection between the erosions of landscape and memory at a former Japanese internment camp in California.
by Emily Troil, Maya Castronovo via Directors' Library on May 1, 2024
Tennessee Valley Authority.

The Dam and the Bomb

On Cormac McCarthy.
by Walker Mimms via n+1 on April 3, 2024
People walking around buildings destroyed by the Johnstown Flood.

A Flood of Tourism in Johnstown

Days after a failed dam led to the drowning deaths of more than 2,200 people, the Pennsylvania industrial town was flooded again—with tourists.
by Matthew Wills, Emily Godbey via JSTOR Daily on March 1, 2024
Residents seek higher ground on the roof of a home as floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina cover the streets on Tuesday, August 30, 2005 in New Orleans

How Hurricane Katrina Changed Disaster Preparedness

Hurricane Katrina exposed deep inequities in federal disaster response. "We never felt so cut off in all our lives."
by Yasmin Garaad via Scalawag on November 16, 2023
A drawing of Corcoran State Prison with water approaching. The top of the image reads "In Harm's Way".

In California, Climate Chaos Looms Over Prisons — and Thousands of Prisoners

How decades-old decisions to build two California prisons in a dry lakebed and a chaotic climate left 8,000 incarcerated people at risk.
by Susie Cagle via The Marshall Project on October 24, 2023
Venable Mound, Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, built ca. 700–1200 CE.

Monuments Upon the Tumultuous Earth

For thousands of years, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids along the Mississippi River.
by Boyce Upholt via Emergence Magazine on March 23, 2023
Abandoned Brownwood subdivision, now the Baytown Nature Center, near Houston, Texas.

What Survives

Lacy M. Johnson walks through a nature center near Houston that has reclaimed the land where a neighborhood, sunken by oil extraction and floodwater, once stood.
by Lacy M. Johnson via Emergence Magazine on March 9, 2023
A girl sits on a cot as she floats it across a flooded street in Baluchistan province on Oct. 4.
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A History of U.S. Interference Worsened Pakistan’s Devastating Floods

Development aid targeted for water as an economic and technical matter had environmental and financial consequences.
by Maira Hayat via Made By History on October 12, 2022
A "High Water" sign mirrored in front of a black and white portrait of two Black men standing in front of a boat on the water

Songs for a South Underwater

After the 1927 Great Flood, Black musicians from the Delta produced an outpour of songs testifying to the destruction. The same is true today.
by Sergio Lopez via Scalawag on February 11, 2022
Photograph of an American Northwest forest.

The Long-Lost Tale of an 18th-Century Tsunami, as Told by Trees

Local evidence of the cataclysm has literally washed away over the years. But Oregon’s Douglas firs may have recorded clues deep in their tree rings.
by Max G. Levy via Wired on September 23, 2021
A house and an american flag

A Disaster 100 Years in the Making

Covid-19 and climate change are drastically intensifying insecurity in New Orleans.
by Eric Klinenberg via New York Review of Books on October 22, 2020
Hurricane Katrina flooding.

Through Hell and High Water: Katrina's First Responders Oral History Project

A collection of interviews with rescue workers who responded to the disaster.
via The Historic New Orleans Collection on June 27, 2020
Dredging Vessel in the water

Dredging Up the Past

A shoreline expert writes about dredging vessels, Louisiana, neoliberalism, and her lifelong quest to save her hometown from the sea.
by Megan Milliken Biven via Current Affairs on May 25, 2020

Goodbye to Good Earth

A Louisiana tribe’s long fight against the American tide.
by Boyce Upholt via Oxford American on September 3, 2019
Aftermath of Great Molasses Flood in Boston.

The Great Molasses Flood of 1919: The Day Boston Was Swamped by a Deadly Wave

100 years ago, an enormous steel tank ruptured, sending a torrent of brown syrup on a deadly path through Boston's North End.
by Mike Shanahan via Boston Globe on January 9, 2019
Abandoned house surrounded by water.

Chronicling the End Times on Tangier Island

Earl Swift’s Chesapeake Requiem looks at life on a beautiful, vanishing Virginia island in Chesapeake Bay.
by Mickie Meinhardt via The Bitter Southerner on December 4, 2018
Freedom Hill historic marker half underwater in a flood.

The Water Next Time?

For generations, a North Carolina town founded by former slaves has been disproportionately affected by environmental calamity.
by Danielle Purifoy via Scalawag on October 10, 2018

Willful Waters

Los Angeles and its river have long been enmeshed in an epic struggle for control.
by Vittoria Di Palma, Alexander Robinson via Places Journal on May 1, 2018
Aerial map showing New Orleans and steamboats on the Mississippi River.

How Humans Sank New Orleans

Engineering put the Crescent City below sea level. Now, its future is at risk.
by Richard Campanella via The Atlantic on February 6, 2018

The Flood Blues

How floods have united people of color from the Gulf Coast states for nearly a century.
by Tyina Steptoe via Process: A Blog for American History on September 15, 2017

A Devastating Mississippi River Flood That Uprooted America's Faith in Progress

The 1927 disaster exposed a country divided by stereotypes, united by modernity.
by Susan Scott Parrish via Zócalo Public Square on April 14, 2017

The Devastating 1889 Johnstown Flood Killed Over 2,000 People in Minutes

When a dam gave way after unprecedented rainfall, it sent a wall of water barreling toward a Pennsylvania town of 30,000 people.
by Alex Q. Arbuckle via Mashable on February 5, 2017
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