The History of Disasters

History keeps a second ledger, written in catastrophe. This timeline collects the disasters of the last millennium: the Black Death carrying off perhaps a third of Europe in the 1340s, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 shaking Enlightenment confidence along with the city, the famines and fires of the industrial age, the 1918 influenza that killed more people than the war it followed, and the storms and pandemics of our own century. Read together, these events show more than suffering. They show societies learning, slowly and unevenly, to build codes, quarantines, forecasts and vaccines against the next blow. The listings below run era by era, each entry linked to a full event page with its date, region and human cost.