How people died, and what killed them.
Deaths, disasters, and accidents — the dramatic, the absurd, the avoidable. Written with restraint, never with cheap thrill.
Five weeks before the Strasbourg massacre, Basel built a wooden house on an island in the Rhine, locked roughly six hundred of its Jews inside, and burned it.
Read the story →On 21 September 2001 a fertilizer plant in Toulouse exploded with the force of a small nuclear bomb. France first assumed it was terrorism. It wasn't.
Read the story →Edward II of England was forced to abdicate, locked in a Gloucestershire castle, and died there in September 1327. Or did he escape and live another fourteen years?
Read the story →On 4 August 2020 the same chemical that destroyed Texas City in 1947 destroyed central Beirut. It had been quietly stored in a port warehouse for six years.
Read the story →On 24 July 1915 a steamer chartered for a Western Electric company picnic capsized at its Chicago River mooring. 844 people died in twenty feet of water.
Read the story →Six weeks before the plague reached the city, the council of Strasbourg deposed its mayors, replaced them, and burned the city's Jewish community alive.
Read the story →On the morning of 25 October 1760 the King of Great Britain rang for his chocolate, walked to the privy, and was dead before his valet got back.
Read the story →On 8 May 1902 a volcano on Martinique destroyed a city of thirty thousand. Two men lived to tell about it. One was in a dungeon.
Read the story →On 16 April 1947 a French freighter loaded with fertilizer caught fire at a Texas dock. Everyone but Captain de Guillebon ran. He fought the fire.
Read the story →On 6 December 1917, Vince Coleman had ninety seconds to warn the incoming trains. He used them, and then he was gone.
Read the story →Tycho Brahe died because nobody told him he could leave the dinner table. Four centuries later they dug him up to find out for sure.
Read the story →Félix Faure had ambitions of being Caesar. On a February afternoon in 1899, he became something else.
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