1 The death toll may have been far higher than the city’s official tally of 293. “A true count wasn’t possible,” Berg writes. Intense heat disintegrated bodies. And it was difficult to estimate how ...

Picture it: London, 1666, a city of narrow streets, timber-framed buildings, and a flickering candlelight. That year, the inevitable happened. A bakery mishap ignited the Great Fire of London, a blaze ...

The Great Fire of London in 1666, which razed 436 acres of the mostly-timber city and lasted for four days, was so devastating it secured its place in the history books. But a key part of this ...

In December 1835, Lower Manhattan was decimated by a tragic fire that claimed 700 buildings. The destruction of the incident was exacerbated by frigid temperatures which froze the water from firemen’s ...

In the age of climate change, “natural disaster” is more of a misnomer than ever. We can absolve ourselves of responsibility for volcanic eruptions and earthquakes (except the ones caused by fracking) ...

Today we thought we would travel outside of the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. But why? We hear you shout when you have 1,000 years of medieval history to go at. Well, the answer is ...

Buildings throughout Chicago claim to have “survived” the 1871 fire, which destroyed just about everything, including edifices that were so-called fireproof, in a three-mile swath of the city. How do ...

Untapped New York is excited to partner on an editorial collaboration with the Gotham Center for New York City History. In this series, we’ll share fascinating stories from the Gotham Center Blog ...

It’s believed that sparks from cooking fires spread to a mattress factory and the fire spread. It destroyed 146 blocks of Jacksonville. That was three-quarters of all buildings in Jacksonville at the ...