When it went down in flames, the Hindenburg went down in history. The era of airship travel ended with a disastrous explosion May 6, 1937. Sam Shere's photo of the Hindenburg in flames has been called the most famous news photograph ever taken. The entire episode from first flash to destruction took less than a minute. It happened so fast that Shere, who could feel the heat of the burning airship, had no time to raise his camera to his eye. His famous...

From AD 61, when Queen Boudicca - outraged at her treatment at the hands of the Romans - marched on the city and burned it to the ground, London has been hit by wave upon wave of destruction. This fascinating and unique book tells the story of over 2000 years of disaster from fire, water, disease, pollution, accident, storm, riot, terrorism and enemy action. It chronicles well-known episodes like the Great Plague of 1655 and the Blitz, as well as...

In 2009, after seismic tremors struck the Italian mountain town of L'Aquila, survivors were subjected to a "second earthquake"-invasive media attention and a relief effort that left them in a state of suspended citizenship as they were forcibly resettled and had to envision a new future. In Citizens without a City, Jan-Jonathan Bock reveals how a disproportionate government response exacerbated survivors' sense of crisis, divided the local population,...

On a summer day in September 1666, the Great Fire of London began at Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane. This nonfiction text gives students a sense of what life was like on that fateful day, and details the aftermath of the disastrous fire that changed London forever. Developed by Timothy Rasinski and featuring TIME content, this book includes essential text features like an index, captions, glossary, and table of contents. The intriguing sidebars,...

"On All Saints Day of 1755, the tremors from a magnitude 8.5 earthquake swept furiously from its epicenter in the Atlantic Ocean toward the Iberian Peninsula. Nowhere was it felt more than in Lisbon, then the thriving capital of a great global empire. In a few minutes most of Lisbon was destroyed -- but that was only the beginning. A tsunami swept away most of the ruined coast along the Tagus River and carried untold souls out to sea. When fire broke...

More than 9 million Germans died as a result of deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after World War II-one quarter of the country was annexed, and about 15 million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known. Over 2 million of these alone, including countless children, died on the road or in concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere. That these deaths occurred at all is still being denied by Western...

"Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides - the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonizingly widespread. A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. The distinguished historian Geoffrey Parker examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they...