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Hot Topics

HNN Hot Topics: Natural Disasters


Hurricane Sandy from space as it approaches the Atlantic coast of the United States, October 28, 2012. Credit: NASA.

Hurricane Sandy

  • Matthew Algeo: Grover Cleveland’s Hurricane (11-1-12)
  • Walter Russell Mead: Nature and Nature’s God (10-31-12)
  • Carl Zimring: How Hurricane Sandy Affected One Historian (i.e. Me) (10-31-12)

    • Q & A

  • Why Hurricanes Have Names: The History Behind Hurricane Nomenclature (8-25-11)
  • "Category Five": How a Hurricane Yardstick Came to Be (12-20-05)
  • Normand Forgues-Roy: Was Katrina the Biggest, the Worst Natural Disaster in U.S. History? (10-23-05)

    • Historic Natural Disasters

  • Map of World Hurricanes since 1851 (8-27-12)
  • An Earthquake in Virginia? It's Happened Before. (8-23-11)
  • David Welky: When the Levee Doesn’t Break (5-10-11)
  • James Boyden: Explaining the Apocalypse: The Impact of Hurricane Katrina (4-10-10)
  • Hannah Regan: Think the East Coast Blizzards Were Bad This Year? Try 1947 (3-21-10)
  • James Ridgeway: Mother Jones: The Secret History of Hurricane Katrina (8-29-09)
  • 1900 Hurricane Changed Galveston and Forecasting (9-12-08)
  • Colin Fisher: San Diego's Natural Disaster Wasn't Entirely Natural (10-27-07)
  • Great New England Hurricane of 1635 Even Worse Than Thought (11-21-06)
  • Kevin R. Kosar: The Executive Branch’s Response to the Flood of 1927 (10-30-05)
  • The Ten Worst Natural Disasters (8-29-05)
  • Melissah J. Pawlikowski: When Hemingway Took the Government to Task for a Hurricane Disaster that Cost Hundreds of Lives (9-26-05)
  • Katrina ... Greatest Natural Disaster in Our History? (9-17-05)
  • Interview with Erik Larson: The Hurricane that Destroyed Galveston in 1900 (9-9-05)
  • Interview with Pete Daniel: The Great Flood of 1927 (9-8-05)
  • Eliot Kleinberg: The Florida Flood that Accounted for the Most Deaths of Black People in a Single Day (Until Katrina) (9-6-05)
  • John M. Barry: The 1927 Flood -- The Worst in History (Until Now) (9-5-05)
  • Willie Drye: How FDR Handled the Fallout from the Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 (9-2-05)
  • Dan Murphy: How History Was Affected by Krakatoa: The Effect of Natural Disasters (12-30-04)