ABSTRACT
As communities in the United States recovered from one disaster after another, there was a growing body of knowledge about what response and recovery looked like. There was also a growing understanding that the needs of communities and their victims exceeded local capacity. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the drought that plagued the Dust Bowl for several years during the 1930s captured the attention of the nation. Each of these events demonstrated that disasters and their effects do not respect state boundaries; the financial effects of the drought that plagued the southern Great Plains during the Depression rippled across the nation.
