How is the Personal Historical? Writing a History of New Orleans after Katrina

The events of the 2005 hurricane season thrust the city of New Orleans into the national limelight in a way it had not experienced since the time of Reconstruction.  The city was central to the national economy from the late-eighteenth through, at least, the early twentieth century.  But by 2005, New Orleans for most was only a site of hedonistic pleasure. Thus, professional historians largely ignored the city, even as the insular tendencies of residents made it difficult for non-residents to write histories of the city.  Many who wrote about New Orleans did so as natives or as long-term residents of the city. Today, recovering the history of the city is critical to the survival of its distinct culture. In such a moment, what is the role of the native-born or resident historian? The historical profession has long prized objectivity and resisted notions of subjectivity that have been embraced in literary studies and in feminist scholarship, even as its hiring practices have often aligned knowledge specialties with some accepted notions of difference (African Americans teaching African American history, for example). In doing so, historians generally have discounted the skill needed to recover such histories; have ignored the subjectivity in other areas of history; and have discounted the possibility that such subjectivity could be an asset. How might a subjective history of New Orleans become one of many ways in which historians deepen their own understanding of the ways in which identity and memory influence written histories and the profession?