The Decade Chicago Lifted Itself Out of the Mud
In the 1850s the central business district of Chicago was raised four to fourteen feet on jackscrews while continuing to operate. People kept eating at the hotels.
Read the story →A century
19th century
8 stories from this century.
The Plague Novel Mary Shelley Wrote in 1826
Eight years after Frankenstein, Mary Shelley published a novel about a global pandemic that kills everyone except one narrator. Critics hated it. They had reasons.
Read the story →The Doctor Who Took the Handle Off the Pump
In September 1854, John Snow walked door to door through Soho with a map, a hypothesis, and a problem the city wouldn't believe.
Read the story →The Volcano Nobody Wrote About
Tambora killed more people than Krakatoa, cooled the planet for two years, and started the Year Without a Summer. The Western press barely noticed.
Read the story →The Loudest Sound Ever Heard
On a Monday morning in August 1883, a volcano in the Sunda Strait made a noise that was registered, four thousand eight hundred kilometers away, as gunfire.
Read the story →The Summer That Wasn’t, and the Monster It Made
In June 1816 it rained for a month at Lake Geneva. Five English visitors were stuck indoors. One of them was eighteen years old, and she had a dream.
Read the story →The French President Who Died on the Job
Félix Faure had ambitions of being Caesar. On a February afternoon in 1899, he became something else.
Read the story →The Smell That Built a City
London's sewer system was funded in eighteen days. It took a heatwave, a river of feces, and a Parliament that could not breathe.
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