The Seven Years Europe Ate Its Own
The rain started in May 1315 and did not stop. Across northern Europe the harvest failed for three years running. By 1317 cities were locking up their own children.
Read the story →Earthquakes, fires, floods, eruptions, and the human responses to them.
17 stories in this theme.
The rain started in May 1315 and did not stop. Across northern Europe the harvest failed for three years running. By 1317 cities were locking up their own children.
Read the story →On the same evening as the Great Chicago Fire, a wildfire two hundred and fifty kilometers north killed five times as many people. Almost nobody heard about it.
Read the story →The Great Chicago Fire killed three hundred people and burned a quarter of the city. Mrs. O'Leary's cow had nothing to do with it. A reporter admitted he made the story up.
Read the story →Between 1645 and 1715 the surface of the Sun was nearly blank. Sunspot counts dropped to almost zero. Europe froze. Astronomers noticed, then forgot.
Read the story →On 21 September 2001 a fertilizer plant in Toulouse exploded with the force of a small nuclear bomb. France first assumed it was terrorism. It wasn't.
Read the story →Eight years after Frankenstein, Mary Shelley published a novel about a global pandemic that kills everyone except one narrator. Critics hated it. They had reasons.
Read the story →On 4 August 2020 the same chemical that destroyed Texas City in 1947 destroyed central Beirut. It had been quietly stored in a port warehouse for six years.
Read the story →From around 1300 to 1850 the northern hemisphere ran a few degrees colder. Glaciers advanced, harvests failed, Norse Greenland died, and the Thames repeatedly froze.
Read the story →On 24 July 1915 a steamer chartered for a Western Electric company picnic capsized at its Chicago River mooring. 844 people died in twenty feet of water.
Read the story →On 30 June 1908 something exploded above central Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb. It took the first scientists nineteen years to reach the site.
Read the story →On 8 May 1902 a volcano on Martinique destroyed a city of thirty thousand. Two men lived to tell about it. One was in a dungeon.
Read the story →On 16 April 1947 a French freighter loaded with fertilizer caught fire at a Texas dock. Everyone but Captain de Guillebon ran. He fought the fire.
Read the story →Tambora killed more people than Krakatoa, cooled the planet for two years, and started the Year Without a Summer. The Western press barely noticed.
Read the story →On 6 December 1917, Vince Coleman had ninety seconds to warn the incoming trains. He used them, and then he was gone.
Read the story →On a Monday morning in August 1883, a volcano in the Sunda Strait made a noise that was registered, four thousand eight hundred kilometers away, as gunfire.
Read the story →In June 1816 it rained for a month at Lake Geneva. Five English visitors were stuck indoors. One of them was eighteen years old, and she had a dream.
Read the story →London's sewer system was funded in eighteen days. It took a heatwave, a river of feces, and a Parliament that could not breathe.
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