Andy Horowitz, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Connecticut State Historian University of Connecticut
- Hartford CT
Dr. Horowitz is a public historian, scholar of the modern United States, and Connecticut's State Historian.
Biography
Andy’s first book, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 (Harvard University Press, 2020) won a 2021 Bancroft Prize in American History, and was named the 2021 Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and a 2020 Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. He also co-edited Critical Disaster Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), and served as guest editor for a 2021 special issue of Southern Cultures, entitled “Human/Nature.” He has published articles in the Journal of Southern History, Southern Cultures, and Historical Reflections, as well as essays in the The Atlantic, Time, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times.
Andy’s teaching has covered five centuries of American history: north, south, east, and west, from city to wilderness. As a graduate student, he was awarded Yale’s Prize Teaching Fellowship twice. At Tulane, his teaching was recognized with a William L. Duren ’26 Professorship.
Before he began work on his Ph.D., Andy was the founding director of the New Haven Oral History Project, directed the Imagining New Orleans documentary project after Katrina, and was a research associate at American Routes, the national public radio program.
Areas of Expertise
Education
Yale Law School
M.S.L.
2023
Yale University
Ph.D.
2014
Yale University
B.A.
2003
Accomplishments
Bancroft Prize in American History, Columbia University Libraries
2021
Humanities Book of the Year, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities
2021
Research, Scholarship, and Artistic Achievement Award for Best Book, Tulane University
2021
Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, Publishers Weekly
2020
C. Vann Woodward Prize for Best Dissertation in Southern History, Southern Historical Association
2015
George Washington Egleston Prize for Best Dissertation in American History, Yale University
2015
Media
Media Appearances
Larry Pemberton Jr. becomes first Native American elected to CT General Assembly
Connecticut Public Radio online
2026-01-21
Connecticut State Historian Andy Horowitz said he attended Pemberton’s swearing-in Wednesday because he wanted to witness history. “I think people have a sense in the United States and in Connecticut that progress can happen on its own, that just because a certain amount of time has passed, a good thing will necessarily come,” Horowitz said. “That’s just not true. The arc of history doesn’t bend on its own.”
Writing The Book about Katrina with Andy Horowitz
Writing It! Podcast online
2025-10-20
We’re speaking with UConn Associate Professor of History Andy Horowitz, who also serves as the Connecticut State Historian. We talk about Andy’s first book, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 (Harvard University Press, 2020) which won a 2021 Bancroft Prize in American History, and was named the 2021 Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and a 2020 Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly.
Hurricane Katrina at 20
Gulf Streams Podcast online
2025-09-08
With Hurricane Katrina's 20th anniversary landing in August, we sit down with Dr. Andy Horowitz (University of Connecticut) to discuss his book Katrina: A History, 1915-2015. Together we discuss the longterm impacts of the disaster, how the conditions in New Orleans were primed for disaster, and what recovery means -- and what we can learn -- in an age of more frequent extreme weather.
Author of book on Hurricane Katrina debunks myths and misconceptions
NPR - Morning Edition radio
2025-08-28
NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Andy Horowitz, author of "Katrina: A History 1915-2015," about misconceptions post-Hurricane Katrina and his assertion that what happened in 2005 was entirely predictable.
Hurricane Katrina forced changes at FEMA. Trump is rolling them back
NPR | All Things Considered radio
2025-08-27
"Katrina was a catastrophic government failure by every measure," says Andy Horowitz, a historian and expert on the Gulf Coast who wrote a book about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
20 years after Katrina, New Orleans’ levees are sinking and short on money
Grist online
2025-08-27
“Since 2005, several storms have made landfall on the Gulf Coast that far exceed the stated design capacity of the new ‘risk reduction system,’” said Andy Horowitz, a historian at the University of Connecticut and the author of a book on Hurricane Katrina. “It’s just chance, or luck, that one of them didn’t hit New Orleans. One day, inevitably, one will.”
With a year to go, Connecticut may see 'grassroots' celebration of America's 250th with low funds
Hearst Connecticut Media print
2025-07-03
Connecticut State Historian Andy Horowitz, who is a commission member, said that despite the funding levels it has long been the commission's plan to empower local communities "rather than doing top-down centralized planning emanating out of Hartford."
"We’re not able to distribute state funds on the scale we had hoped, but it's not as though there was some giant thing not happening because the plan was always this would be a community-based commemoration,” he said.
Two Connecticuts: How gaps between rich and poor define life in CT
Hearst Connecticut Media print
2025-05-19
So how did Connecticut become a national capital of inequality? Andy Horowitz, a UConn professor and the state’s official historian, argues the state — like everywhere else in the U.S. — has always had rigid hierarchies based on race, gender and class, dating back to colonial times.
Several Connecticut museums and tourism spots set to lose federal funding
Hearst Connecticut Media print
2025-04-18
Andy Horowitz, a UConn history professor whose role as state historian requires him to advise state government and promote the teaching of history, said massive funding cuts ordered by the Trump administration imperil free speech and free thought.
"The destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the destruction of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the attacks on our universities, these are structural assaults on our social capacity to think, to question, to speak and to learn," Horowitz said during an afternoon news conference in the Legislative Office Building hosted by Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, co-chairwoman of the legislature's budget-writing Appropriations Committee.
Resolution condemning 1638 treaty that targeted Pequots moves forward in legislature
New London Day print
2025-03-28
In testimony submitted to the committee, Horowitz wrote that certain facts surrounding the Treaty of Hartford, signed Sept. 21, 1638, among the Connecticut Colony and the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes, “are clear and, to my knowledge, not in dispute.”
“Among these facts,” he wrote, “are that the Treaty of Hartford declared that ‘the Pequots ... shall no more be called Pequots,’ confiscated the Pequots’ traditional lands, and condemned Pequots either to death or slavery.”
The CT Museum of Culture and History celebrates its 200th birthday
WSHU Public Radio radio
2025-02-27
“The amazing thing about history is that the facts don't change, the past doesn't change, but we do,” state historian Andy Horowitz said. "So we can always be asking new questions about these old stories.”
Untangling the complexities of U.S. history in the classroom
WNPR - Disrupted radio
2025-01-10
In recent years, politicians across the U.S. have been debating what history should be taught in the classroom. Connecticut is no exception to these debates— a 2022 press conference announcing a planned Native Studies curriculum in Connecticut's public schools turned tense when questions around the specifics of the program came up.
This hour, we’re talking to historians and educators to learn what it's like to teach and study the past in all its complexity in today's polarized political climate.
Category 5
The Signal online
2024-10-17
Andy Horowitz is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut and the author of Katrina: A History, 1915-2015. Horowitz says the increasing frequency of powerful hurricanes has meant that more and more communities have less and less time to fully recover from one hurricane before they have to prepare for the next. And that, in turn, has exposed the limits of existing U.S. policies—in areas from transportation to housing. The costs and harms of hurricanes to American communities, Horowitz says, are fundamentally the result of how these communities have been built. In which sense, hurricanes are natural events with increasingly artificial consequences.
CT historian looks back at 1976 bicentennial as the U.S. prepares to celebrate 250 years
Hearst Connecticut Media print
2024-07-04
Nearly 50 years ago in July of 1976 communities across Connecticut celebrated the United States’ 200th birthday with a variety of parades, historic exhibits, reenactments and other commemorations.
Today, in many ways, those commemorations tell us more about the turbulent 1970s than they do about the 1770s, says Andy Horowitz Connecticut’s State Historian. He’s thinking about this a lot these days as a member of the Connecticut Semiquincentennial Commission, which is coordinating the many events that will culminate on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
History Is Spoken; Or, “New Haven Man Eats Ham Sandwich And Survives”
New Haven Independent online
2024-06-10
That’s because the new technology platform, called TheirStory!, takes care of all the tech, including providing legal permission slips, transcribing, editing, indexing, uploading to archives, and everything else, so it was advertised, short of raising a glass with you and toasting at the end of the interview.
“The goal is to make everything easy,” said Andy Horowitz, who was pitching the program both as a proud child of the New Haven Jewish Community (and Yale) and in his recently appointed new role as the Connecticut State Historian.
Restoring CT's historic churches costly but worth it, preservationists say: 'Making our inheritance useful'
Hearst Connecticut Media print
2024-06-09
Andy Horowitz, Connecticut's state historian, said the separation of church and state may be viewed "as fundamental to what it means to be the United States," but there was no such distinction for early colonists.
"In the 1600s, church attendance was required, church membership was required, and attendance was expected," he said. "If you can imagine the difficulty of travel those days, it wasn’t feasible to live very far from the Puritan Congregational Church."
Stuffy, Preppy, Sleepy: Can a Rebrand Fix Connecticut’s Reputation?
The New York Times online
2023-12-09
“It certainly would be easy enough to dismiss efforts to brand the state as a frivolous exercise,” said Andy Horowitz, the Connecticut state historian.
Why 'natural' disasters aren't as natural as their name suggests
WNPR - Disrupted radio
2023-11-08
Listening to the news, it feels like there are more natural disasters than ever. This hour, we talk about why flooding and droughts are becoming so common and discuss how the word "disaster" affects the way we view an event. First, Connecticut State Historian Andy Horowitz explains why understanding disasters involves looking at the decisions people made before the devastation, sometimes decades before.
New CT state historian arrives at time of Capitol controversy
Hearst Connecticut Media print
2023-10-30
Andy Horowitz, a UConn professor who is the new state historian, is sitting in his mostly sparse office on the fifth floor of the university’s downtown campus. Out the window, a mile away, the gold dome of the State Capitol pokes above the city skyline. From this vantage, it’s hard to tell that it needs a planned new layer of gold leaf.
On one of the walls is a 1748 map of New Haven, his hometown. There’s a poster from the city’s historic May Day protest of 1970, which brought together the local minority community and Yale students in protest against the arrest of nine Black Panthers. Nestled in one of the bookshelves is “Katrina,” his award-winning 2020 book, published by the Harvard University Press, about the 2005 hurricane that culminated a long line of catastrophic storm events dating back 100 years that devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi delta.
Andy Horowitz is the new Connecticut State Historian
WNPR - Where We Live radio
2023-10-20
Walt Woodward held the position of Connecticut State Historian for nearly twenty years. He retired in 2022 to make way for the next Connecticut State Historian.
Although our state is small, it’s got a big history. From the Connecticut Witch Trials of the 1600s to some more recent history, like the Sandy Hook Shootings and even the COVID-19 pandemic, Connecticut is not short on history.
Andy Horowitz is the next Connecticut State Historian. He says that history doesn't gain validity depending overtime. Even modern history is still history.
Connecticut planning more than a parade on America’s 250th
CT Mirror online
2023-07-12
“I think the anniversary is an extraordinary provocation,” Horowitz said after the meeting Wednesday.
He means that in a good way.
“What we’re trying to do on the commission, and it’s one of the things that I want to do in my new role as state historian, is to help people so they can get to engage in acts of collective autobiography, to try to write our own story,” said Horowitz, a professor at the University of Connecticut.
Articles
New Orleans’ History Is America’s History, and Katrina Is America’s Possible Future
In These Times2025-08-29
On September 29, 1915, at the muddy end of the Mississippi’s farthest reach into the Gulf of Mexico, one hundred miles downriver from New Orleans, an unnamed hurricane made landfall. An anemometer recorded wind gusts of 140 miles per hour there, at the town of Burrwood, Louisiana, where on easier days several hundred members of the Army Corps of Engineers lived in orderly cottages and worked to keep the shipping canal at the river’s mouth clear of sediment. As the storm moved upriver, the aneroid barometer at Tulane University plummeted to 28.10 inches. The rain gauge filled with 8.36 inches of precipitation in twenty-one hours. Even in a region accustomed to hurricanes, these were extraordinary measurements. Isaac Cline, the chief meteorologist at the United States Weather Bureau in New Orleans, reported that the storm was “the most intense hurricane of which we have record in the history of the Mexican Gulf coast, and probably in the United States.”
Katrina's America
Southern Cultures2025
On August 29, 2005, when I was twenty-four and living in Connecticut, I watched the levees surrounding metropolitan New Orleans collapse on television. I called my ex-girlfriend, a fifth-generation New Orleanian who was then living in Lafayette. When she answered the phone, I heard crying in the background. Friends from New Orleans had evacuated to her place, and they too were watching the city fill with water on television. People who had remained in the city were drowning in their attics.
A history professor argues that college budget cuts put CT on wrong side of history
Hearst Connecticut Media2024-02-16
When I started my new job this fall, as a history professor at the University of Connecticut, I did not think I was naïve about the challenges facing public higher education. I was aware of the recent ruinous cuts in West Virginia and Wisconsin, the ideological attacks in Florida, and the assault on tenure in Georgia and Texas. But I consoled myself with the idea that those states were controlled by Republicans who have long been hostile to the public sector. Connecticut has a Democratic governor, a Democratic-majority state legislature, and several years of record budget surpluses.
Hurricane Ida Offers a Glimpse of the Dystopia That’s Coming for All of Us
The New York Times2021-08-31
As a boy, Louis Armstrong worked for the Karnofsky family. The Karnofskys’ tailor shop on South Rampart Street in New Orleans became a second home to him, and the family helped him buy his first cornet. On Sunday night, the Karnofsky building, long neglected by the city and a succession of private owners who promised to restore it, finally collapsed under the force of Hurricane Ida’s winds.
A Humane Vision
Southern Cultures2021
Senate and the House of Representatives, ca. 1965. Pamphlet held in the Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, photographed by the author. pocene river.” The Choctaw-speaking people native to the place, however, knew and know the river as Bulbancha,“a place for foreign languages.” That name suggests that the river has long been a site of cosmopolitan encounter, and more broadly, as the Houma writer T. Mayheart Dardar puts it,“as with all Indigenous Peoples, our existence and identity is tied to the land and waters that have given birth to us.”
Hurricane Katrina wasn’t a ‘natural’ disaster
Boston Globe2020-08-23
On Sept. 29, 1915, at the muddy end of the Mississippi’s farthest reach into the Gulf of Mexico, 100 miles down river from New Orleans, an unnamed hurricane made landfall. An anemometer recorded wind gusts of 140 mph there, at the town of Burrwood, La., where on easier days several hundred members of the Army Corps of Engineers lived in orderly cottages and worked to keep the shipping canal at the river’s mouth clear of sediment.
Hurricane Katrina Showed Us How Spectacularly the Government Can Fail Its People. Fifteen Years Later, the Pattern Continues
Time Magazine2020-08-26
Angela Perkins made it to the convention center in New Orleans. When she finally reached what was supposedly a shelter of last resort, nobody was there to offer help. She dropped to her knees, closed her eyes and cried, “Help us, please!”
It was September 1, 2005, three days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and New Orleans’s levee system had collapsed, and most of the city was underwater. Hundreds of people had drowned. The survivors remained in terrible danger, after days without food or water, their strength fading in the blistering heat. At the convention center, Perkins summoned the attention of the people around her, each as desperate as the next, and led them in a chant as a photographer took her picture. The following day, it appeared on the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, under a huge headline drawn from her plea: “HELP US, PLEASE.”
