Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Earthquakes
There is something uniquely chilling about a natural disaster, the uncontrolled, unpreventable fury of normally benign elements: a blue sky now black exploding in water and electricity; the air around us sudd
It’s more than just whimsy
Our hurricane-naming system evolved much the same way our baby-naming system did. Just as it’s easier to say “Jane Q.
How to get a drink or a meal or a night’s sleep before April 18, 1906
On the 100th anniversary of the 1906 calamity, a student of earthquakes seeks its traces in the city he loves most.
An all-but-forgotten San Francisco photographer has left us a grand and terrible record of the destruction and rebirth of an American city
When The Great Earthquake struck New England, learned men blamed everything from God’s wrath to an overabundance of lightning rods in Boston. Two hundred and twenty-five years later, geologists are at last discovering the true causes.
Shortly before dawn the five-inch pine spindle of the Faneuil Hall wind vane snapped, dislodging the thirty-pound gilded cricket that spun ten feet above Boston’s marketplace roof. Early risers first heard the baying of dogs, then the roar.
THUS SPAKE THE GREAT INDIAN CHIEF TECUMSEH, PREDICTING— SOME BELIEVED—THE SERIES OF VIOLENT EARTHQUAKES THAT STRUCK THE MIDWEST IN THE WINTER OF 1811–12
The town of New Madrid in southeastern Missouri looks out over a treacherous stretch of the Mississippi River, studded with bars and laced with stumpy shores—a graveyard of rivercraft, and haunted. Some of the ghosts are dead dreams.
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