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Lisbon

4 stories from this place.

The Cabinet June 26, 2026 · Lisbon

The Earthquake That Hit Catholic Europe on All Saints Day in 1755 and Substantially Broke Eighteenth-Century Theology

A magnitude 8.5–9.0 earthquake struck Lisbon at approximately 9.40 AM on 1 November 1755 — All Saints Day, when the city's churches were full. The earthquake, the fires that followed, and the tsunami forty minutes later killed approximately 30,000 to 50,000 people. The European Enlightenment never substantially recovered the cosmic optimism of the early 18th century.

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The Footnote June 26, 2026 · Les Délices, Geneva

The 234-Line French Poem Voltaire Wrote in Three Weeks After Lisbon and the Three-Year Argument It Started With Rousseau

Voltaire wrote the *Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne* in mid-November 1755 — three weeks after the earthquake — as a direct philosophical attack on the Leibnizian doctrine of optimism. Rousseau answered with a long defence in August 1756. The argument substantially defined the French Enlightenment's theological position for the next generation.

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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Las Palmas, Canary Islands

Christopher Columbus Believed in a Smaller Earth Than Eratosthenes Had Measured and That Is Why He Sailed

The Eratosthenian Earth circumference (about 250,000 stadia, accurate to 2%) was the standard ancient figure but had been substantially undermined by a competing late-antique calculation by Posidonius. Columbus took the smaller Posidonian figure as his planning baseline. If he had used Eratosthenes's number, he would never have sailed.

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