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9781107025868

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Professor Patrick S. Roberts has written an informative and sometimes provocative text raising issues about the complexity of the American disaster system and the challenges for creating a disaster-resilient nation. It is clear that this is not just an academic treatise. It provides a contextual format for young professionals entering the emergency management field as to the difficulties they will face. For the experienced emergency manager it is a 'milepost marker' to help understand how we arrived at this point in our history and their own role in shaping the future of the American disaster experience. - Eric E. Holdeman, Columnist, Emergency Management Magazine, Blogger, Disaster-Zone In this lively book, Roberts lays out the fascinating history of government's growing role in dealing with disasters. His analysis of the change from a government in transition - from responding to events to trying to manage them - is a tremendously important and pathbreaking contribution to a question that increasingly, and inevitably, demands the best thinking we can bring. Roberts has done just that. - Donald F. Kettl, Dean, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland How did the United States end up with the unwieldy homeland security apparatus it finds itself with today? Professor Roberts's masterly account of the development of disaster politics provides the definitive answer. Historically detailed, theoretically rich, and eminently readable, Disasters and the American State traces the social construction of the idea of disaster and the state's role in response. It is an important contribution for anyone interested not just in disaster, but more broadly in the historical development of the American state. - Donald Moynihan, Professor of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Patrick S. Roberts is an Associate Professor at the Center for Public Administration and Policy (CPAP) in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is the Associate Chair and Program Director for CPAP, Northern Virginia. Roberts holds a PhD in government from the University of Virginia, and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow, one at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, California and another with the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University, Massachusetts. He spent 2010–11 as the Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Heidelberg Center for American Studies in Germany. He has also been a reporter for the Associated Press. Roberts' work has been published in a variety of scholarly and popular journals including Studies in American Political Development, the Public Administration Review, the Journal of Policy History, Political Science Quarterly, Publius, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Administration and Society, the Public Organization Review, National Affairs, the Policy Review, American Interest, and USA Today. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Naval Laboratories, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Social Science Research Council.

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