One foundational work in the center’s little disaster library was the chronicle of a monstrous munitions explosion in Nova Scotia in 1917, which killed nearly two thousand people and injured nine thousand more. The author of the study, a Canadian priest and sociologist named Samuel Henry Prince, noted that “the word ‘crisis’ is of Greek origin, meaning a point of culmination and separation.” The instant disaster strikes, “life becomes like molten metal,” Prince wrote. “It enters a state of flux from which it must reset upon a principle, a creed, or purpose. It is shaken perhaps violently out
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