Most of the early (pre-1970) papers on barrier island migration were based on post-storm observations. The decade of the 1970s was an era of intense investigation of barrier dynamics (overwash, inlet and aeolian processes). The Academic Press book Barrier Islands (Leatherman, 1979) brought all the principal North American research together for the first time to provide a unified picture on a morphodynamic, stratigraphic and geographical basis. -from Author