"This awful catastrophe is not the end but the beginning. History does not end so. It is the way its chapters open."--_St. Augustine._ INTRODUCTION The "catastrophe" in sociological literature--The "catastrophic view" _vs._ progress in evolution--Factors in social change--The stimuli factors--What crises mean--Communities and great vicissitudes--Causes of immobility--Catastrophe and progress--Historic cases suggested for study. There are many virgin fields in Sociology. This is one of the attractions the subject has for the scientific mind. But of all such fields none is more interesting than the factor of catastrophe in social change. And strangely enough, if there are but few references to the problem in all our rapidly-growing literature, it is not because catastrophies are few. Indeed it would seem that with the advent of the industrial age, disasters grow more frequent every year.[1] Many are small, no doubt, touching but the life of a village or a borough--a broken dyke, a bridge swept out by ice, a caved-in mine. Others again write themselves on the pages of History--an Ohio flood, an Omaha tornado, a Chicago fire, a San Francisco earthquake, a Halifax explosion. Each in its own way inscribes its records of social change--some to be effaced in a twelve-month--some to outlast a generation. Records they are, for the most part unread. How to read them is the problem. And it may be that when readers have grown in number and the script is better known, we shall be able to seize the moment of catastrophe and multiply immeasurably its power for social good. [1] "Within a score of years disasters ... have cost thousands of lives, have affected by personal injury, or destruction of property no fewer than a million and a half persons and have laid waste property valued at over a billion dollars ... the expectation based on past experience is that each year no less than half a dozen such catastrophies will occur." (Deacon J. Byron, _Disasters_, N. Y., 1918, p. 7.) This quotation refers to the United States alone.