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This article sets out to address the response of traditional societies in facing natural hazards through the lens of the concept of resilience.

This paper considers that resilient societies are those able to overcome the damage caused by the occurrence of natural hazards, either through maintaining their pre‐disaster social fabric, or through accepting marginal or larger change in order to survive. The discussion is based on a review of the corpus of case studies available in the literature.

The present article suggests that the capacity of resilience of traditional societies and the concurrent degree of cultural change rely on four factors, namely: the nature of the hazard, the pre‐disaster socio‐cultural context and capacity of resilience of the community, the geographical setting, and the rehabilitation policy set up by the authorities. These factors significantly vary in time and space, from one disaster to another.

It is important to perceive local variations of the foregoing factors to better anticipate the capability of traditional societies to overcome the damage caused by the occurrence of natural hazards and therefore predict eventual cultural change.

This article takes off from the previous vulnerability‐driven literature by emphasizing the resilience of traditional societies.

Peaceful societies, groups of people described by social scientists as experiencing little if any internal or external violence, embrace the need for peacefulness, in contrast to most of the contemporary world, which accepts violence as normal and inevitable. The purpose of this article is to examine the ways that people in those societies view peacefulness, and to compare those ways with more “normal” violent societies.

The approach taken is a literature review of salient trends about anti‐violence among some of the more highly peaceful societies, and comparable trends in two state‐level societies—Norway, a relatively peaceful state, and the USA, a relatively more violent one.

The findings show that some of the peaceful societies avoid violence through nonresistance—not resisting aggression. In addition, many base their commitments to peacefulness on religious and mythological beliefs, though for others, peacefulness is based on cultural values or is seen as a practical, reasonable way to order their lives. The societies that appear to have very firm commitments to nonviolence are the ones where structures of peacefulness thrive.

The practical value of this research is that it points out how the peaceful societies can be contrasted with modern nation states, and it may suggest ways to challenge general patterns of violence.

AT this time of the year librarians take their holidays. They will need the break this year as much as in any year since the end of the war. There are many problems to be faced in the autumn and winter, among them the continuous rising prices of everything, and the diversion of public funds to rearmament, which must have some repercussions upon the library service. Whether it is yet a fact that the pound is worth little more than five shillings in real money, we are not prepared to say, but it is certain that every cost has increased, and is continuing to increase. Especially is this so in connection with book production and bookselling; even, as our correspondent on another page suggests, in some cases the royalties of authors are in jeopardy. How far this will go it is impossible to say. At the same time the rates everywhere promise to increase still further, and in spite of the advances, it is unlikely that libraries will be exempt from the stringencies of the time. Such predictions have, however, been frequently contradicted by our past experience. Some of the real advances libraries have made have seemed to be the direct result of bad times. This is hardly a holiday meditation, but we think our readers will need all the physical and mental refreshment they can get before they face the possibilities that may follow.

Dental caries (or tooth decay) is our most prevalent disease, and hardly anyone living in present‐day Britain is completely free from it. More than 99% of the population have had teeth attacked by decay, sometimes so severely that a large proportion of their teeth have had to be extracted. The result of dental caries combined with gum disease is that 37% of all the people over 16 in England and Wales are edentulous (i.e. have had all their teeth extracted), while the figure for Scotland is even higher at 44%.

The purpose of this paper is to explore aspects of migration from islands in the context of disasters including climate change.

The paper is a conceptual exploration reviewing strengths and limitations of key literature.

The paper finds that not much work goes into sufficient depth to understand the topic properly. It suggests that truisms should be admitted and the many factors influencing migration should be fully investigated.

The paper examines migration topics from an island perspective.