One of Europe’s most elegant capital cities was laid waste at a stroke when a ferocious earthquake – thought to have measured as high as 9.0 on the Richter scale – hit Lisbon in 1755. It was the morning of November 1, All Saints’ Day, and thousands of citizens were attending Mass in the city’s …
The ancient Romans were a superstitious people, forever looking for portents in natural events. They failed utterly, however, to predict the cataclysm which engulfed the fertile and heavily populated Campanian countryside south of Naples in AD 79. Had they possessed a modern scientist’s understanding of the earth’s behaviour they might have seen the link with …
Lying on the Orontes River some 20 km (13 mi) inland from the Mediterranean coast in what is now the southeastern corner of modern Turkey, the ancient city of Antioch was an important centre of early Christianity. Founded in the late 4th century BC in Syria, as it then was, by Seleucus, one of Alexander …
Germany built the biggest and best airships, having honed the technology after constructing huge Zeppelins from the early years of the 20th century. The guiding light was Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who finalized his revolutionary design for a rigid-frame airship in the 1890s. Before World War I Zeppelins were being used for scheduled passenger flights …
In an era when society has perforce become accustomed to the regular incidence of tragedies involving disturbed loners who run amok, indulging in apparently motiveless killing sprees, it is hard to imagine the unbelieving horror that the first such event recorded in modern times – the Tsuyama massacre – engendered in prewar Japan. The perpetrator …
Fatal fires don’t come more harrowing than the crackling inferno that took Collinwood’s children in 20 awful minutes, and prompted the grief-stricken community literally to vote itself out of existence. It is the worst school tragedy in Ohio’s history. A crisp, sunny, Midwest March morning is no time for a waking nightmare. In the two-story, …