History Repeats Itself, Isabel Wilkerson

During the spring floods of 2011, the New York Times reprinted some of Isabel Wilkerson's Pulitzer-winning 1993 coverage of Midwestern floods. In winning the award, Wilkerson (who visits Tuesday 11/15) became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer in journalism.

"The floods have made the broad, S-curved Mississippi and its otherwise perfectly ordered valley look more like the Florida Keys . ... The river, ecologists and farmers say, was never supposed to follow the tight course humans have expected it to, indeed ordered it to, with their walls of dirt and concrete levees." More.