“Weathering Katrina is a very thoughtful and elegantly executed monograph by a master of the craft. It is social science at its best.”

— Kai Erikson, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies, Yale University

“Mark VanLandingham’s book, Weathering Katrina, tells a fascinating story of how the Vietnamese community in New Orleans East survived a major natural disaster and thrived afterward. It makes a significant contribution to the literature on disasters, community resilience, and ethnic culture.”

 —Min Zhou, professor of sociology and Asian American studies, University of California, Los Angeles

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The principal Vietnamese-American enclave was a remote, low-income area that flooded badly. Many residents arrived decades earlier as refugees from the Vietnam War and were marginally fluent in English. Yet, despite these poor odds of success, the Vietnamese made a surprisingly strong comeback in the wake of the flood. In Weathering Katrina, public health scholar Mark VanLandingham analyzes their path to recovery, and examines the extent to which culture helped them cope during this crisis.

Contrasting his longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews of Vietnamese residents with the work of other research teams, VanLandingham finds that on the principal measures of disaster recovery—housing stability, economic stability, health, and social adaptation—the Vietnamese community fared better than other communities. By Katrina’s one-year anniversary, almost 90 percent of the Vietnamese had returned to their neighborhood, higher than the rate of return for either blacks or whites. They also showed much lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than other groups. And by the second year after the flood, the employment rate for the Vietnamese had returned to its pre-Katrina level.

While some commentators initially attributed this resilience to fairly simple explanations such as strong leadership or to a set of vague cultural strengths characteristic of the Vietnamese and other “model minorities”, VanLandingham shows that in fact it was a broad set of factors that fostered their rapid recovery. Many of these factors had little to do with culture. First, these immigrants were highly selected—those who settled in New Orleans enjoyed higher human capital than those who stayed in Vietnam. Also, as a small, tightly knit community, the New Orleans Vietnamese could efficiently pass on information about job leads, business prospects, and other opportunities to one another. Finally, they had access to a number of special programs that were intended to facilitate recovery among immigrants, and enjoyed a positive social image both in New Orleans and across the U.S., which motivated many people and charities to offer the community additional resources. But culture—which VanLandingham is careful to define and delimit—was important, too. A shared history of overcoming previous challenges—and a powerful set of narratives that describe these successes; a shared set of perspectives or frames for interpreting events; and a shared sense of symbolic boundaries that distinguish them from broader society are important elements of culture that provided the Vietnamese with some strong advantages in the post-Katrina environment.

By carefully defining and disentangling the elements that enabled the swift recovery of the Vietnamese in New Orleans, Weathering Katrina enriches our understanding of this understudied immigrant community and of why some groups fare better than others after a major catastrophe like Katrina.

MARK J. VANLANDINGHAM is the Thomas C. Keller Professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

Winner of the 2017 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology

“In this timely and engaging book, Mona Lynch exposes and examines how draconian federal drug laws operate on the ground. Drawing upon extensive and meticulous research, Lynch paints a disturbing portrait of a flawed system of justice in which Congress has provided remarkable power to prosecutors to induce guilty pleas in drug cases by threatening additional charges that in many cases would double or triple the sentence imposed after conviction at trial. The failure of prosecutors to exercise discretion is matched by the inability of judges to do so, because decades-long sentences are usually mandated by Congress itself. Original, accessible, and critically important, Hard Bargains is a must-read for scholars, lawmakers, lawyers, and citizens interested in achieving more proportional and equitable federal drug policies.”

—KATE STITH, Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law, Yale Law School

“Mona Lynch demonstrates convincingly how changes in U.S. sentencing and drug laws have concentrated the power to punish in the hands of prosecutors. Through on-the-ground research in three contrasting districts, Hard Bargains portrays region-specific ways in which such power is deployed. Weakened due process and the destruction of myriad lives, especially among African American men, is the outcome everywhere. This thoroughly researched and most readable book reveals the urgency of law reform.”

—JOACHIM J. SAVELSBERG, professor of sociology and law, Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair, University of Minnesota

The convergence of tough-on-crime politics, stiffer sentencing laws, and jurisdictional expansion in the 1970s and 1980s increased the powers of federal prosecutors in unprecedented ways. In Hard Bargains, social psychologist Mona Lynch investigates the increased power of these prosecutors in our age of mass incarceration. Lynch documents how prosecutors use punitive federal drug laws to coerce guilty pleas and obtain long prison sentences for defendants—particularly those who are African American—and exposes deep injustices in the federal courts.

As a result of the War on Drugs, the number of drug cases prosecuted each year in federal courts has increased fivefold since 1980. Lynch goes behind the scenes in three federal court districts and finds that federal prosecutors have considerable discretion in adjudicating these cases. Federal drug laws are wielded differently in each district, but with such force to overwhelm defendants’ ability to assert their rights. For drug defendants with prior convictions, the stakes are even higher since prosecutors can file charges that incur lengthy prison sentences—including life in prison without parole. Through extensive field research, Lynch finds that prosecutors frequently use the threat of extremely severe sentences to compel defendants to plead guilty rather than go to trial and risk much harsher punishment. Lynch also shows that the highly discretionary ways in which federal prosecutors work with law enforcement have led to significant racial disparities in federal courts. For instance, most federal charges for crack cocaine offenses are brought against African Americans even though whites are more likely to use crack. In addition, Latinos are increasingly entering the federal system as a result of aggressive immigration crackdowns that also target illicit drugs.

Hard Bargains provides an incisive and revealing look at how legal reforms over the last five decades have shifted excessive authority to federal prosecutors, resulting in the erosion of defendants’ rights and extreme sentences for those convicted. Lynch proposes a broad overhaul of the federal criminal justice system to restore the balance of power and retreat from the punitive indulgences of the War on Drugs.

MONA LYNCH is Professor of Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California, Irvine.

Social Science in Nursing was the product of a three year project examining the application of the social sciences to nursing, conducted at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing.

FRANCES COOK MACGREGOR was visiting associate professor of social science at Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing.

This report, published in 1947, is a guide to public relations programs around health and welfare services. It is written for professional workers, administrators, and volunteers who must answer questions, speak to audiences, or write letters and bulletins about social welfare.

HELEN CODY BAKER was publicity director at the Council of Social Agencies of Chicago.

MARY SWAIN ROUTZAHN was director at the Department of Social Work Interpretation of the Russell Sage Foundation.

Published in 1937 as part of a series of studies dealing with the status of emerging and established professions in the United States.

ESTHER LUCILE BROWN was director of the Department of Studies in the Professions at the Russell Sage Foundation.

Nursing as a Profession was published in 1936 as part of a series of studies dealing with the present status of certain established and emerging professions in the United States.

ESTHER LUCILE BROWN was director of the Department of Studies in the Professions at the Russell Sage Foundation.

In 1949, the Russell Sage Foundation instituted a counseling service for colleges and universities that wished to improve their existing schools of nursing or introduce new nursing curricula, headed by Dr. Margaret Bridgman. After visits to more than eighty colleges around the country, the National League of Nursing Education invited her to continue the work under the new National League for Nursing in 1952. This report presents her findings.

MARGARET BRIDGMAN was academic dean of Skidmore College.

In Drugs and Society, Bernard Barber organizes and criticizes what has been learned about drug behavior by biologists, medical researchers, pharmacologists, sociologists, practicing physicians, economists, and government officials, The author brings out the implications of what is now known, the perils of continued ignorance in many areas, and the need for a great deal of specific new research.

Barber examines the ethical considerations relating to experimentation with drugs on human subjects. He indicates that our social policy for the treatment of drug addicts is based on prejudice and ignorance and that it probably aggravates the troubles it seeks to eliminate.

BERNARD BARBER was professor of sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University