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This chapter provides the basic biographical material necessary to understand the course of Wyclif’s life. The first section traces Wyclif’s career at Oxford University, specifically at Merton and Balliol Colleges. Wyclif was a prolific writer, and while establishing a precise chronology for his works as they have come down to us is difficult, given his apparently extensive re-editing of his works, the chapter describes the organization of his two major philosophical collections, the Summa de Ente and the Summa Theologie. The second section surveys Wyclif’s career in the service of the Duke of Lancaster, his subsequent dismissal from Oxford University, and his ongoing disputes with Bishop William Courtenay of London. During his final years in exile in Lutterworth, Leicestershire, Wyclif produced a significant body of writing, ranging from exegesis to polemics, remaining active in his criticisms of the ecclesiastical status quo.

Two leaders emerged as San Francisco pursued the valley: Mayor James Phelan and naturalist John Muir. Both were determined and led strong constituencies, and each held competing views of the meaning of progress. Phelan was convinced a great dam symbolized human determination and ingenuity, and would enhance nature. Muir was skeptical that humans could improve on nature, and certainly not in the mountain sanctuary of Hetch Hetchy. John Muir and the Sierra Club held the upper hand until the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 intervened to change everything. The prostrate city with four square miles of its heart in smoldering ruins became an object of both pity and charity. Who could deny the city its desire for abundant water? Furthermore, many blamed the fire on the privately-owned Spring Valley Water Company. San Francisco reapplied for a permit. With the support of US Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot and the sympathy of Secretary of the Interior James Garfield, the city felt assured that soon its engineers would be damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley and building an aqueduct to transport the water to the city.

Chapter 1 traces Paul Rusch’s early life in Louisville as the son of a grocer and as a soldier in World War I. After the war, Rusch led an effort to establish a bohemian art colony in Louisville, though his venture eventually went bankrupt and landed Rusch in court. Rusch left Kentucky and then on a lark volunteered to help rebuild the Tokyo and Yokohama YMCA branches after the Great Kanto Earthquake. His connections at Holy Trinity Church in Tokyo led to positions on the Rikkyo University faculty and as a fund-raiser for St. Luke’s International Hospital in Tokyo. As Rusch worked to convert young Japanese men to Christianity by relaunching the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, Japan was swept up in political and social turmoil and militarism. Along the way, he staged the first organized game of American football in Japan and laid the foundation for Japan’s collegiate football league. Dr. Rudolf Teusler mentored Rusch during tours in America, honing Rusch’s skills in fund-raising, expanding his network to include wealthy patrons, and shaping Rusch’s staunch anti-Communist views.

Cuba has had a large medical presence in Haiti since 1998, when Hurricane Georges devastated the country. Cuba responded by sending hundreds of medical staff to help with emergency medical support. It has also trained over a thousand Haitians to become doctors. Some 300 Cuban doctors remained there, and were present when the earthquake struck in 2010. This chapter analyses their role during that tragic period. A year later a cholera outbreak resulted, and again Cuban medical personnel played a major role in bringing it under control. An overview of the Cuban role is provided, and an assessment of 15 years of medical support is provided.

Concludes by arguing that virtually all of the “racial” tropologies of the nineteenth century, which had never completely gone away anyway, surfaced with a vengeance in the popular media storm that followed in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake that practically destroyed the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince

This introductory chapter gives a broad overview of the book. It also lays out a framework for how to understand neighborhoods. They rarely have official status, and are instead cultural constructs whose very existence depends upon the ongoing investments (psychological and material) of residents. Neighborhoods are also constantly in flux. The chapter illustrates this by showing how the borders of the Mission have changed dramatically across the twentieth century. The chapter shows that neighborhood identity has been inextricably bound up with ethnic identity. Finally, the chapter argues that more histories should focus on smaller urban scales, rather than only on the municipal scale.

The Progressive-Era politician James Phelan invited the architect Daniel Burnham to San Francisco in 1905 to make a plan for the city, the Burnham Plan. After the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, a number of Union Labor politicians, led by Abraham Ruef, attempted to centralize authority in the municipal government to make the plan a reality. Seeing that the scheme would radically alter their neighborhood, prominent citizens of the Mission District, like James Rolph, organized. Under the auspices of a new improvement club--the Mission Promotion Association--neighborhood leaders convinced the California legislature not to expand San Francisco's municipal authority, thus halting the Burnham Plan. Though they had allies in the conservative business community, it was the Mission Promotion Association that was most responsible for defeating the plan.

Over the first decades of the twentieth century, this model of urban governance was harnessed to unprecedented crises, both local and international. The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake inspired a national response to the disaster that extended the capacities of a still new organization, the American Red Cross. Closely linked to the presidency, the Red Cross came to function as a voluntary infrastructure for the extension of national efforts, an arrangement that would be solidified in the mobilization for the First World War. During that conflict, “voluntary” giving to a national cause was established as a model of good citizenship and institutionalized through the charitable deduction to the individual income tax.

The ultimate test of how well prepared a society is to cope with and recover from a crisis is another crisis.The lessons of the economic crisis of 2008 show how long it takes to bring about reforms, and how difficult international co-operation to achieve greater coherence can be. Looking to the future, disasters – global and local – are likely to exceed past trends, challenging the capacity of individual countries to absorb their impact. Cross-border, cross-sectoral, place-based strategies will be difficult for governments to introduce and implement, as illustrated by examples from the past two decades, and by the risks associated with flooding. Earlier in the 20^th century, modern networked infrastructure utilities were seen as a point of vulnerability, but bombing in war did not bring about an expected collapse of urban societies and economies. Instead, this experience highlighted the factors of resilience. Strengthening resilience makes sense but it is not a cost-free strategy. The greatest risk to resilience comes from the fragmentation of society and a loss of social capital.

In 1912, United States Geological Survey researcher Myron L. Fuller published an account of the New Madrid earthquakes. This report languished until seismologist Otto Nuttli re-focused scientific attention in 1973. Still, New Madrid science remained on the fringe, partly because of a sensationalized, false prediction by Iben Browning in 1990. Slowly, researchers at CERI (Center for Earthquake Research and Information) and interdisciplinary efforts in paleoseismology assembled evidence for the quakes. Yet the science remained contested. In the early twenty-first century, researchers debated magnitude estimates and likely recurrence. By the New Madrid Bicentennial, consensus surrounded the need for disaster planning in mid-continent, through the efforts of CUSEC (Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium) and related agencies. Planners and scientists increasingly looked to worldwide parallels, just as people had in 1812. In attention to local knowledge, first-person accounts, and bodily experience, contemporary New Madrid science began to draw in surprising ways on historical roots.

This chapter describes the 9.0 magnitude earthquake, 60-foot tsunami, and nuclear meltdown which make up Japan’s 3/11 disasters. After introducing theories of resilience and recovery, it defines networks and governance and illuminates how they affect disaster survival and recovery. Focusing especially on the main categories of social capital – bonding, bridging, and linking – this chapter lays out the structure for the overall book.

Most people who visit Yellowstone are blissfully unaware they are standing on top of an active, breathing volcano. They visit geysers and hot springs, and may feel some of the numerous earthquakes that rattle the region. Few realize the seemingly solid ground beneath them is slowly stretching apart and huffing and puffing upward and downward. Nor are many visitors aware of the large chamber of molten and partially molten rock several miles beneath their feet, or of the even deeper plume of hot rock moving up from deep within Earth. Indeed, it is easy to enjoy the national park’s geysers and other scenery without stopping to consider they are merely the uppermost, most visible parts of one of the world’s geological wonders: the Yellowstone hotspot. Even fewer tourists realize the same forces driving Yellowstone’s renowned geysers also reshaped the landscape of 25 percent of the northwestern United States—a broad band stretching from Yellowstone almost 500 miles southwest to the Idaho—Oregon—Nevada border. As North America drifted southwest over the hotspot during the past 16.5 million years, the immense heat and molten rock rising from Earth’s mantle melted, rearranged, and blew apart the overlying crust. Today, the hotspot is beneath Yellowstone, making the national park a field laboratory of active geologic process: volcanism, earthquakes, faulting, and large-scale movement and deformation of Earth’s crust. Let us examine how this system works—how heat and magma, or molten rock, from within the Earth drive small-scale features such as geysers and hot springs, contribute to the most intense earthquake and volcanic activity in the Rocky Mountains, and help mold the topography of the region. The amount of heat flowing from the ground in the Yellowstone caldera is thirty to forty times more than the heat emitted by an average piece of ground elsewhere on Earth’s continents. This enormous heat flow provides the energy that melted rock under the caldera and helped lift Yellowstone to its lofty altitude. Heat powers Yellowstone’s volcanic activity by melting rock in Earth’s mantle and crust. In turn, the molten rock heats groundwater to produce geysers and hot springs.

This chapter recalls the steps taken by the Japanese government to bring back order to Tokyo right after the Great Kantō Earthquake. Aware that the unprecedented disaster required an equally unparalleled response, the “emergency cabinet” of Prime Minister Yamamoto Gonnohyōe created the Rinji shinsai kyūgo jimukyoku or the Emergency Earthquake Relief Bureau to oversee disaster relief and recovery. Relief activities were organized in the following areas: food, shelter and housing, materials and supply, communications, drinking water, medical aid and hygiene, relief funds and donations, financial accounts, general affairs, police, and intelligence. The chapter concludes by describing how the government, together with the media, started to facilitate the eventual culture of renewal and reconstruction by inculcating that the earthquake was a national tragedy.

On the morning of October 28, 1891, an unusually powerful earthquake centered in the Nōbi Plain near Nagoya rocked central Japan from Osaka to Tokyo. Contemporary seismologists, estimating on the basis of the yet-to-be-invented Richter scale, place the earthquake's magnitude as 8.4, making it the strongest seismic event in modern Japanese history. Given the power and extent of what would be named “the Great Nōbi Earthquake,” it was natural that all parties to the seismic question would flock to the ruins and draw lessons. The range and diversity of the destruction between Nagoya and Osaka indeed provided the evidence for many types of argument. On the one hand, there were tens of thousands of collapsed and/or burned Japanese wooden farmhouses. On the other hand, a number of very large European-style buildings and engineering structures had also dramatically failed.

This concluding chapter briefly outlines the developments that happened during the reconstruction of Tokyo after the Great Kantō Earthquake. It highlights an event in 1930 when the Shōwa Emperor personally inspected the city as part of the celebration of the rebirth of Tokyo. Three locations stood out significantly during the Emperor's tour—the unfinished Taishō Earthquake Memorial Hall in the Honjo Ward, the Chiyoda Primary School, and the bluff at Ueno Park. Viewing all of these changes from different standpoints can reveal the specific qualities of Japanese society. From the perspective of the Tokyoites, these changes brought by the land readjustment and reconstruction process demonstrated their remarkable resilience. On a broader governmental level however, the debates over the scope and scale of reconstruction reflected the unwillingness and inability of elites and institutions to put their differences aside during a moment of national emergency.