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by David Laskin
On an unseasonably warm winter day in 1888 in the Great Plains, a ferocious blizzard suddenly blew up out of nowhere, and soon 500 people (mostly children) were dead.
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by Marilyn Chase Bubonic plague entered the port of San Francisco with the 20th century. For the next decade, it defied both medical and political efforts to eradicate it from an urban landscape fraught with ethnic distrust, new money, and old customs. 362.196 C487
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by Stewart O'Nan The circus was in town, and July 6, 1944, was the day to experience the delight of the Big Top. Shortly after the matinee performance began a small fire started, creeping up the sidewall, and in moments jumped to the paraffin-coated canvas roof and exploded. Thousands were injured, and 167 lost their lives, including an unclaimed little girl, buried as Miss 1565. 974.6 O58
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by Mike Capuzzo
In the summer of 1916, an unthinkable horror occurred that shocked Americans out of their complacency and innocence: a rogue white shark left its customary deep ocean habitat, found its way to the towns of Beach Haven and Spring Lake in New Jersey, and began attacking swimmers.
597.31 C255
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by Simon Winchester
Lasting little more than a minute, the earthquake wrecked 490 blocks, toppled a total of 25,000 buildings, broke open gas mains, cut off electric power lines throughout the Bay area, and effectively destroyed the gold rush capital that had stood there for a half century.
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by Steve Olson
For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, sightseers, and nearby residents listened anxiously to rumblings in Mount St. Helens. No one was prepared when an immense eruption took the top off of the mountain and laid waste to hundreds of square miles of verdant forests in southwestern Washington State.
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by Albert Marrin
On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City burst into flames. The factory was crowded. The doors were locked to ensure workers stayed inside. One hundred forty-six people -- mostly women -- perished. 974.7 M359
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by John Kelly Later called the Black Death, the mid-fourteenth-century plague epidemic was known as the Great Mortality by its European survivors. It killed 60 percent in many places, even more in self-contained communities, such as monasteries -- in all, one-third of Europe's people.
614.57 K29
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by Rachel Slade
Takes readers on the final voyage of the El Faro, an aging container ship, in 2015, bound for a collision course with hurricane Joaquin near the Bahamas. 910.9 S631
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by Erik Larson
1900 Galveston, Texas. Children played in the rising water. Hundreds of people gathered at the beach to marvel at the fantastically tall waves and gorgeous pink sky, until the surf began ripping the city's beloved beachfront apart. Within the next few hours Galveston would endure a hurricane that to this day remains the nation's deadliest natural disaster.
976.4 C641 XL
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by Simon Winchester
An erudite, fascinating account ... (that) chronicles the underlying causes, utter devastation and lasting effects of the cataclysmic 1883 eruption of the volcano island Krakatoa in what is now Indonesia.
551.21 W759
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by Adam Higginbotham
Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world.
363.17 H635
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by Laura Spinney The greatest massacre of the twentieth century. One in three human beings around the globe was infected. From 1918 to 1920, the estimated number of deaths resulting from this illness ranges between 50 and 100 million people. 614.5 S757
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by Sebastian Junger
It's late October 1991, and a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Mass., is making its way home from the Grand Banks. Coming to meet the boat is a hurricane off Bermuda, a cold front coming down from the Canadian Shield, and a storm brewing over the Great Lakes. Things get ugly quickly, unexpectedly. also available in alternate format(s)
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by Al Roker The Johnstown Flood was a 19th-century disaster that destroyed a Pennsylvania town, killed thousands, and raised questions of privilege and liability that still resonate. 974.8 R742
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by Dean King
When the American cargo ship Commerce ran aground on the northwestern shores of Africa in 1815 along with its crew of 12 Connecticut-based sailors, the misfortunes that befell them came fast and hard, from enslavement to reality-bending bouts of dehydration.
916.48 K52
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by Daniel Brown
On September 1, 1894, two big fires south of Hinckley, Minnesota, combined under weather conditions conducive to firestorms. By nightfall, Hinckley and three nearby hamlets were no more. More than 436 persons were incinerated, and some 400 square miles were so thoroughly burned that the soil was rendered useless.
977.662 B877
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by Sonali Deraniyagala
On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. 954.93 D427
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by Roberta Brandes Gratz
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is one of the darkest chapters in American history. The storm caused unprecedented destruction, and a toxic combination of government neglect and socioeconomic inequality turned a crisis into a tragedy. But among the rubble, hope.
307.1 G773
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by Timothy Egan
America's worst assault from Mother Nature came in the form the "dust bowl" (that) covered 100 million acres spread over five states. From 1930 to 1935, nearly a million people left their farms, littered with animal corpses and stunted crops. also available in alternate format(s)
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