Sociohistory of the Field

Descriptions of calamities exist as far back as the earliest human writings, but systematic empirical studies and theoretical treatises on social features of disasters appeared only in the twentieth century. The first major publications in both instances were produced by sociologists. Samuel Prince (1920) wrote a doctoral dissertation in sociology at Columbia University that examined the social change consequences of a munitions ship explosion in the harbor of Halifax, Canada. Pitirim Sorokin (1942) two decades later wrote Man and Society in Calamity that mostly speculated on how war, revolution, famine, and pestilence might affect the mental processes and behaviors, as well as the social organizations and the cultural aspects of impacted populations. However, there was no building on these pioneering efforts.

It was not until the early 1950s that disaster studies started to show any continuity and the accumulation of a knowledge base. Military...