This segment reviews the historical events and theories that have been developed for the purpose of explaining and describing bubbles and crashes. As such, it necessarily touches on a wide variety of subjects, from a review of the random-walk and efficient market hypotheses, to rational expectations, behavioral finance, technical analysis of transaction volumes, entropy, elements of chaos theory, credit and money, and even psychology and money. All of this is needed to establish a baseline of knowledge of what has already been tried and what already exists in this field. It is then possible, in Part II, to more readily present the new approaches developed here and compare them to those that have come before.