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From the birth of print, ballads were composed about all kinds of disasters: fires, earthquakes, shipwrecks, storms, and floods. As the modern era arrived, new kinds of technology meant ballads about new kinds of disasters: mining explosions and collapses, and railway disasters. In the early modern period, certain events could be interpreted as signs from God, and so this category includes ballads about wonders, such as comets, angels, 'monstrous' births both human and animal, and celestial visions. It also includes prognostications in ballad form, as people tried to predict where and when the next disaster would occur.