(David Greenberg - School of Communication) I am interested in looking at how Hurricane Katrina and the 1927 Mississippi Flood cast light on the public demand for government provision of relief services. Coming in an era when little was expected of the federal government, the 1927 flood prompted Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover to undertake an unprecedented relief effort -- a harbinger of the kinds of government projects that would become more prevalent under FDR. Society, including conservative Republicans, saw the limits of what the private sector could accomplish. In contrast, the Bush administration's response to Katrina came during a rage for assigning public responsibilities to private actors -- with the outraged public response revealing that the appetite for an activist federal government (at least in critical areas) had not diminished as Reagan-Bush Republicans had expected or hoped.