About this Book

«Reading Fritz, it becomes clear that disaster provides not only opportunities and communities but a changed sense of self that matters.» (Rebecca Solnit in "A Paradise built in Hell")

The text in this report was written in 1961. This raises an obvious question of why it remained unpublished for 35 years? Also, why did the Disaster Research Center (DRC) decide to publish it at this time as part of its Historical and Comparative Disaster Series? To understand part of the reasoning behind the latter decision requires some understanding of the answer to the first question. Reconstructing the past is not always easy. However, as part of an oral history of the early workers in the disaster research field in the United States, we have for the last ten years been conducting interviews with those involved, as well as collecting many personal and organizational documents, including letters and other records. From such an array of relevant primary and secondary data, we think we have been able to ascertain what happened concerning the original manuscript prepared by Fritz. (From the Foreword by E. L. Quarantelli)