Douglas Brinkley: Chronicling 'The Great Deluge'

Historian and author Douglas Brinkley teaches at Tulane University and was displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

He has since returned to New Orleans and begun to document the catastrophe by gathering oral histories — he hopes to collect as many as 20,000 — for a book, tentatively titled The Great Deluge.

Brinkley plans to donate all proceeds to the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research center in the city's French Quarter.