American studies has been dedicated to understanding cultural forms from its beginnings as a field. Music, as one such form, is especially centered in the field as a lens through which to seek the cultural “essence” of US America – as texts from which to glean insight into negotiations of intellectual thought, social relations, subaltern resistance, or identity formation, or as a form of labor that produces an exchangeable commodity. In particular, the featuring of folk, indigenous, and popular music directly responded to anxieties in the intellectual circles of the postwar era around America's purported lack of serious culture in comparison to Europe. According to John Gilkeson, American studies scholars in the 1950s and 1960s “vulgarized” the culture concept introduced by the Boasian school of anthropology, opening the door to serious consideration of popular culture as equal in value to high culture.1

Left to Chance: Hurricane Katrina and the Story of Two New Orleans Neighborhoods and Children of Katrina are two titles in an important University of Texas Press series called the Katrina Bookshelf. Series editor Kai Erikson is well known for his seminal book Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (1976), about the Buffalo Creek flood disaster on 26 February 1972 in which over 132 million US gallons of black waste water broke through three dams and virtually wiped out sixteen coal towns in West Virginia, demolishing (as Erikson's book title indicates) everything in its path. Similarly, and with the same aim as Everything in Its Path of combining broadly relevant findings with the particulars that inhere to every catastrophe, these books in the Katrina Bookshelf series of five (to date) focus on how families in two particular New Orleans neighborhoods (Left to Chance) and on how children and youth in New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast (Children of Katrina) navigated and negotiated their lives before and after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Louisiana on 29 August 2005. Both books, then, track how people and neighborhoods were impacted during the hurricane, immediately afterward, and up to seven years after the floodwaters receded. Valuably for future policy and prevention efforts, the stance in both books is the continuous juxtaposition of individual and structural influences on disaster outcomes.