Author and journalist Simon Winchester examines the 1906 California earthquake, which devastated San Francisco. He focuses on the geology that allowed this earthquake and the historical impact of the quake.
President of Solimar Research Group looks at the history of natural and man-made disasters in Los Angeles over the past 40 years, focusing particularly on recent unrest beginning in 1992. He considers efforts to revitalize and unify the city in the wake of these events and whether these efforts have been successful.
Professors Lawrence J. Vale, Thomas Kochan, and J. Phillip Thompson discuss issues related to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the recovery of New Orleans. Vale looks at past urban disasters and how these cities have changed and recovered; Kochan contrasts Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to Pearl Harbor with Bush's to Katrina; and Thompson looks at racial tension in New Orleans, prior to and after the hurricane.
On September 1, 1894, an incredible fire raged in East Central Minnesota. In only four hours, over 300,000 acres -- 480 square miles -- of Minnesota lay in smoldering ruins.
Come visit the Hinckley Fire Museum to find out what happened, who lived, and who died.
The St. Paul & Duluth Railroad Depot, rebuilt immediately after the fire, houses a range of exhibits and features a dramatic mural of the fire, painted by artist Cliff Letty.
Please note that the museum is open May through mid-October
Dr. Kent Germany, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, argues that the rise of suburbs and the decline of the inner city factored into the larger struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s and set up the conditions exposed by Hurricane Katrina.
In this podcast, Richard Miller describes the steps taken to ensure the survival of AP Hotaling & Co.'s San Francisco warehouse at 451 Jackson Street—the largest depository of whiskey on the West Coast—in the aftermath of the Great Earthquake of 1906.
The History Center of Olmstead County presents the history of Olmstead County, Minnesota. To this end, the center operates as a museum. The museum includes rooms devoted to the decorative arts; a hands-on children's cabin; and exhibits on topics which include IBM, St. Mary's Hospital, the 1883 Rochester tornado, and historical medicine. Artifact collections include textiles, military, decorative arts, Native American, agricultural and mechanical, and medical items. The center also operates the Mayowood Estate historic house museum. Erected in 1911 as the home of Dr. Charles H. Mayo, cofounder of the Mayo Clinic, Mayowood now contains period rooms.
The museum offers exhibits, educational programs, hands-on activities, museum tours, traveling trunks, and library access. Reservations are required for tours. The center also organizes baseball games, played in 1860s style. The Mayowood Estate offers period rooms and guided tours. The website offers virtual exhibits.
JAHA museums include the Johnstown Flood Museum, the Frank & Sylvia Pasquerilla Heritage Discovery Center, and the Wagner-Ritter House & Garden; the Johnstown Children's Museum is currently under construction. In addition, JAHA produces the AmeriServ Johnstown FolkFest and a wide variety of special events. JAHA maintains an extensive archive of objects, photographs and documents that are significant to the history of Johnstown and the surrounding areas.
The Johnstown Flood Museum offers exhibits, a short film, and tours;
Who started the Quebec City fire of June 28, 1845? It was depicted in an 1848 painting by Joseph Légaré called The Fire in the Saint-Jean Quarter, Seen Looking Westward. My art teacher mentioned something about a slave breaking out of her master's home, and being so angry she burnt down their house and started the fire. She wound up being hung. Is this true?
I have been unable to find anything about an angry slave being responsible for the fire. And what I have found appears to make such a story highly unlikely.
Quebec suffered two major fires in 1845, exactly one month apart.
On the 28th of May, in the late morning of a scorchingly hot day, a fire began at a small tannery owned and overseen by a Mr. Richardson on Arago Street near Saint-Vallière Street in the St.-Roch district. The fire began when a boiler that was used to heat leather dye burst. Church bells in the St.-Roch section began ringing in alarm and a small crowd gathered outside the tannery and started “ill-directed efforts to extinguish the flames,” according to a military officer who happened onto the scene.
The intense heat of the day, combined with a very stiff wind, spread the fire quickly through the streets of St.-Roch, lined with small wooden buildings packed closely together. The district of St.-Roch lies in the lower section of the city between the river and a cliff leading to the upper section of Quebec City. The high wind blew into the heated air above the fire and swirled against the cliff into a shifting vortex that carried sparks in unpredictable directions, seemingly in pursuit of terrified people trying to escape the fire, blocking their escape. The fire was only stopped when the mayor ordered the military to blow up a line of houses as a firebreak to protect the warehouses and commercial district next to the river. In eight hours, the fire of May 28 killed 50 people, destroyed about 3,000 shops and sheds, roughly 1,650 houses, and left many thousands of people homeless. About a third of the city was left in ruin.
About 11 o’clock on the night of June 28th, another fire broke out in a shed in back of the house of a notary, M. Texsier, on d'Aiguillon Street, near d'Youville Street in the Saint-Jean Baptiste section of the city, which is located next to the St.-Roch section that had been destroyed the month before. According to the Quebec Mercury at the time, the fire “arose from the emptying of a can of hot ashes on a dunghill.” This strongly suggests that the fire was not deliberately set.
As before, the weather had been hot and dry that day and a gale wind once again blew over the city. Throughout the night of June 28th, the fire spread out and by morning the entire St.-Jean section, another third of the city, along with 1,300 houses, churches, and schools, had been destroyed. During the night, thousands of people who had fled the St.-Roch fire and had settled temporarily in the St.-Jean section again had to flee.
Joseph Légaré’s painting of this fire, a copy of which is now in the Art Gallery of Ontario, depicts “an apocalyptic vision of orange flames and fiery sparks heat[ing] up the black sky in an earthly inferno,” as art historian Anne Newlands says in her book, Canadian Art: From Its Beginnings to 2000. Many of the terrified residents the night of that fire did indeed see something like an apocalypse, a providential pursuit of the city. Newspapers reported that many people saw terrible angels of flame in the sky above the city that night, which skeptics attributed to reflected mirages playing across the layers of heated air. One month later, practically the entire city stayed awake and on edge during the day and night of July 28th, on the possibility that Quebec would be revisited by a third and final fire. But that did not happen.
In all, the two fires destroyed two-thirds of the city, but I have found no evidence that either of the fires was caused by anything other than accidents.
Joseph Légaré, The Fire in the Saint-Jean Quarter, Seen Looking Westward (1848), Art Gallery of Ontario. See also the copy at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
John Murray, View of Québec, Canada, from the river St. Charles, shewing the conflagration of June 28, 1845, and the ruins of the fire of May 28th, 1845 (1845), colored ink on paper, at the McCord Museum in Montreal.
Royce G. Tennant, Lerisa Huntingford, Canada in the 1840: The Nation’s Illustrated Diary. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2004.
George Gale, Quebec ‘Twixt Old and New. Quebec: The Telegraph Printing Company, 1915.
“The Late Calamitous Fire at Quebec,” The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, September 20 1845, pps. 453-454.
Humanities Texas announces more than $50,000 in grants for Texas cultural and educational organizations recovering from Hurricanes Dolly, Gustav, and Ike.
Texas cultural and educational organizations may request grants of up to $2,000 for immediate needs resulting from the 2008 storms. Grants support collection replacement, conservation work, and professional consultation.
Libraries that suffered losses to their collections as a result of the hurricane may apply for grants of up to $2,000 to support collection development in such humanities fields as literature and history. Purchases may include books, media resources, and other educational materials.