This chapter traces the evolution of federal disaster law and policy in the United States from the nation’s founding to the present. While many excellent histories of related topics already exist, this chapter will focus on three key aspects of this evolution. First, the chapter illustrates how the current federal policy structure is less a comprehensive system than an ad hoc agglomeration of policies and programs built on disparate experiences including natural disasters, wartime preparation, economic crises, and others. Second, the chapter explores the outsize role that political considerations, as opposed to best practices drawn from recovery management experiences, have played in shaping current federal disaster response and recovery approaches. Finally, recent events, including Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Maria, are explored to illustrate the tradeoffs inherent in the United States’ federated system of disaster response.

Chapter 1 introduces the broad objective of the book. This is to show how history can be used to understand why biophysical shocks and hazards, sometimes leading to disasters, push societies in different directions – creating a diversity of possible social and economic outcomes. In order to understand this diversity, we need to look not only at institutional responses but also at the social actors behind these responses, who may have very different goals, not always equivalent to the ‘common good’. We illustrate how shocks and hazards, and the disasters that sometimes ensued, could thus have very diverse consequences not only between societies, but also within the same societies, between social groups, and across wealth, ethnic, and gender lines. In discussing these issues, the book goes back in time further than the modern period. Although the Industrial Revolution and associated new technologies brought momentous changes, these did not create a fundamental rift between the period before and after the Industrial Revolution, and we argue that the underlying mechanisms remained similar. After the outline of the intentions of this book, the chapter concludes with a survey of the fields of disaster studies, disaster history, and the relevant interpretative frameworks in historical research.