Explore the disasters that shaped history. From natural catastrophes and deadly accidents to strange historical tragedies, these are the events that transformed cities, nations, and entire civilizations.
The Halifax Explosion of 1917: The Largest Blast Before the Atomic Age On the morning of the 6th of December 1917, the people of Halifax went about an ordinary Thursday. Children dressed for school. Workers filed into the factories and rail yards of the city’s north end. And along the waterfront, as a column of…
The Year Without A Summer: How a Volcano Created Frankenstein In 1816, summer simply did not arrive. Across Europe and North America, the warm months that should have ripened the crops and filled the markets came instead with frost, snow, endless rain, and a strange, sunless gloom. People called it the Year Without a Summer,…
The Great Stink of 1858: The Summer London’s River Nearly Emptied Parliament. In the summer of 1858, the most powerful empire on Earth was very nearly brought to its knees by a smell. Not a war. Not a rebellion. Not a financial collapse. A smell. The River Thames, which flowed right past the seat of…
Violet Jessop: The Women Who Survived Three Shipwrecks Some people seem to have all the luck in the world. Others seem to attract disaster wherever they go. Violet Jessop somehow managed to be both at once. She stood on the decks of the three greatest ocean liners ever built by the White Star Line, and…
The Day Niagara Falls Stopped: The 1848 Mystery That Silenced The Falls There are some sounds in the world that simply never stop. The roar of Niagara Falls is one of them. For thousands of years, day and night, summer and winter, more than three thousand tonnes of water have thundered over its edge every…
The London Beer Flood of 1814: The Day London Drowned in Ale On a Monday afternoon in October 1814, a wall of beer fifteen feet high tore through one of the poorest neighbourhoods in London. It moved faster than a person could run. It flattened houses, swept families out of their beds, and drowned eight…
The Erfurt Latrine Disaster: When 60 Nobles Drowned in 1184 History is full of grand tragedies. Battles lost, cities burned, empires undone by ambition. And then there is the Erfurt Latrine Disaster, an event so undignified that for centuries people assumed it had to be a joke. It was not. On a summer morning in…
The Great Molasses Flood of 1919: The Day Boston Drowned in Syrup In January 1919, a wall of molasses 15 feet high tore through a city street at 35 miles per hour. It sounds absurd. It was horrifying. This is the great molasses flood. History is full of disasters that defy imagination. Plagues, fires, floods,…