We Came to Rebuild New Orleans

""We Came to Rebuild New Orleans examines the experiences of the mass of volunteers who cycled through post-Katrina New Orleans contributing to post-disaster cleanup, gutting and rehabbing homes, new construction, service delivery, and wetlands restoration. Through fine-grained case studies of volunteers, Christopher E. Manning provides us with a unique window into their motivations, desires, and experiences. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans casts a critical eye on the limits of nonprofit and volunteer-led reconstruction, but also sketches a practical way forward that might center more democratic and effective coordination of public resources and local recovery and reconstruction work in the event of future disasters.""--Cedric Johnson, editor of The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans ""Christopher Manning's We Came to Rebuild New Orleans is an erudite model of engaged scholarship on one of the worst disasters to ever befall an American city. Manning vividly describes the enormous altruism of volunteer recovery workers specifically and the American people in general, while convincingly documenting the inadequacy of relying upon nonprofit volunteer labor to execute a recovery of this scale. This is a must-read for anyone interested in public policy, disaster relief, environmental sustainability, or the history of American cities.""--Timothy J. Gilfoyle, associate editor of the Journal of Urban History and editor of The Urban Underworld in Late Nineteenth-Century New York ""Manning has produced a book that is at once a model application of oral history and a probing examination of the massive volunteer response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the city of New Orleans. This engaging public history offers important lessons for how to better integrate volunteer and government resources in the response to future disasters.""--Theodore J. Karamanski, author of Mastering the Inland Seas: How Lighthouses, Navigational Aids, and Harbors Transformed the Great Lakes and America