The great drought disaster during 1876-1879 is a research focus of historical disasters and extreme drought's social impact. Based on historical documents,relevant scholars made a large amount of research results on the main issues of the drought disaster,including climate change background and drought severity,social vulnerability, social impact and social response. This review make a systemic summary on research stages,research methods,research perspectives and main conclusions of the related research literatures. These literatures comprehensively covered different perspectives and regional scales,presenting the key links of social impact and response of the drought disaster,with obvious regional imbalance. By applying the methods of historical facts statement, comprehensive analysis,quantitative evaluation,spatial distribution and process analysis,comparative analysis and statistical analysis,these literatures concluded that the interaction between extreme drought and social vulnerability, enlarged the social impacts and weakened the disaster relief effects,resulting in an extremely cruel catastrophe. In the future,the studies on the drought disaster should be focused on integration,interpolation and reconstruction of spatial distribution and temporal evolution for key indexes,regional difference and relation of social impact and response,and quantitative interpretation on the mechanism of the interaction and feedback between extreme drought and human society.