On December 6th, 1917, the young curate at Saint Paul’s Anglican Church, Halifax, was a witness to the greatest manmade explosion prior to the atom bombs. Samuel Prince was no stranger to death: quite apart from being a priest in a city at war, he had spent weeks at sea with a crew, retrieving bodies from the Titanic and somewtimes performing the ‘burial for the dead’ there, in the North Atlantic. .

Unlike the other witnesses, however, Prince was also a budding social scientist. Samuel Prince saw these disasters with a kind of double vision, as a clergyman and as a sociologist. Prince wrote his doctoral dissertation at Columbia on the Halifax Explosion, which he described as “blowing Halifax into the Twentieth century.”

In this commentary on that work, Catastrophe and Social Change, Susan Dodd (also a sociologist of disaster studies, also a professor at the University of King’s College where Prince lived and taught) considers Prince’s account of the explosion and what both the explosion and the witnessing can teach us a hundred years on.