This chapter traces the evolutionary maturation of emergency management in America. It has been a slow and torturous process of ‘‘coming of age,’’ made all the more difficult by the unique peculiarities of America’s democratized, constitutional, and federal republic and made more urgent by the implacable extension of our ‘‘built environment’’ into harm’s way. The chapter also shows that what is evolving in emergency management, more often than not unconsciously, is a ‘‘network entity,’’ similar in some respects to ‘‘network orga- nizations’’ that have developed in the private sector but different in other respects. It has the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) at its center but is a complex net- work with a distinctive political economy and a ‘‘network management process,’’ if we understand that ‘‘management’’ in this sense is something quite different from the com- mand-and-control characteristics usually connoted by the word. The chapter concludes with some questions concerning the future of emergency management, FEMA, and the network of which FEMA is the center.