Disasters Chapters

Whether natural or man-made, disasters simultaneously cause massive destruction and unity of people trying to help those in need. Discover some of the world's worst disasters in this collection.

Will Chicago's steam-powered fire engines be enough to fight a huge conflagration in 1871?

James W. Gerard, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, writes of difficulties when talking about the Lusitania sinking with the German army.

NASA designs four "abort methods" in case the space shuttle has a problem during its ascent, following launch..

Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin are allies in the plan to defeat Hitler.

Soldiers arriving back in the U.S. spread the Spanish flu through the entire country. Hardest hit are large-crowd events, such as Philadelphia's Liber...

Villagers and health-care workers in the vicinity of Yambuku, Zaire (now the Republic of Congo) are getting extremely sick, then dying. No one knows w...

Chicago's prosperous and proud business district burns to the ground.

The submerged Titanic is located in 1985.

SOS signals and lifeboats can't help people on the Titanic. The wireless operator on the closest ship, about an hour away, has shut-off his system fo...

View the 24-hour timeline of the Banda Aceh earthquake and resulting tsunami.

The mission is a convoluted hornets nest. US soldiers are not ready for Somali mobs who fight back. Rescue is difficult because of poor directions, na...

Read a poem about the life of Jamie Bishop, a German instructor, and Ryan Clark, a 22 year-old senior in Psychology/Biology/English.

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