Author: Richard Tames
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780431068787
Category : Fires
Languages : en
Pages : 32
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Book Description
Designed to tie in with the National Curriculum, this study of London at the time of the Great Plague and the Fire is one of a series examining major historical watersheds. The book recounts the chain of events leading up to the Great Plague and the Fire, and the repurcussions, both immediate and long-term. It also discusses the concept of an historical turning point, assessing in what way this really was one. Interpretations throughout aim to show how history is informed by a complicated web of divergent views.
Author: James C. Mohr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198036760
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
A little over a century ago, bubonic plague--the same Black Death that decimated medieval Europe--arrived on the shores of Hawaii just as the islands were about to become a U.S. territory. In this absorbing narrative, James Mohr tells the story of that fearful visitation and its fiery climax--a vast conflagration that engulfed Honolulu's Chinatown. Mohr tells this gripping tale largely through the eyes of the people caught up in the disaster, from members of the white elite to Chinese doctors, Japanese businessmen, and Hawaiian reporters. At the heart of the narrative are three American physicians--the Honolulu Board of Health--who became virtual dictators when the government granted them absolute control over the armed forces and the treasury. The doctors soon quarantined Chinatown, where the plague was killing one or two people a day and clearly spreading. They resisted intense pressure from the white community to burn down all of Chinatown at once and instead ordered a careful, controlled burning of buildings where plague victims had died. But a freak wind whipped one of those small fires into a roaring inferno that destroyed everything in its path, consuming roughly thirty-eight acres of densely packed wooden structures in a single afternoon. Some 5000 people lost their homes and all their possessions and were marched in shock to detention camps, where they were confined under armed guard for weeks. Next to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Chinatown fire is the worst civic disaster in Hawaiian history. A dramatic account of people struggling in the face of mounting catastrophe, Plague and Fire is a stimulating and thought-provoking read.
Author: Daniel Defoe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fires
Languages : en
Pages : 518
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Book Description
Author: Pamela Oldfield
Publisher: Scholastic UK
ISBN: 1407132911
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
A time of horror has come to London. In one terrible summer, more than 15% of its population will perish. As the bubonic plague ravages London's streets, mercilessly plucking up victims and filling the plague pits with corpses, 13-year-old Alice Paynton records the outbreak in her diary. "It seems that in the past week 700 people have died of the plague. So the plague has well and truly come to London... One of the houses in the next street had a red cross painted on the door. Above the cross someone had chalked Lord Have Mercy Upon Us." Alice's chilling diary brings alive one of the darkest moments in British history: the Great Plague of 1665-1666.
Author: Walter George Bell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
Thomson, George.
Author: Stephen Porter
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
ISBN: 1848680872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Offers a narrative history of the Great Plague which struck England in 1665-66. This title is illustrated with over 80 contemporary images.
Author: James Leasor
Publisher: House of Stratus
ISBN: 0755100409
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Author: Samuel Pepys
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781789430998
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Samuel Pepys gives a unique first hand account of life during the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London. Pepys stayed in London while many of the wealthy fled the city in the face of the plague. His careful observation and interest in the details of people's lives as well as the events of the time are unparalleled.
Author: Rebecca Rideal
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 125009707X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
1666 was a watershed year for England. An outbreak of the Great Plague, the eruption of the second Dutch War, and the devastating Great Fire of London all struck the country in rapid succession and with devastating repercussions. Shedding light on these dramatic events and their context, historian Rebecca Rideal reveals an unprecedented period of terror and triumph. Based in original archival research drawing on little-known sources, 1666 opens with the fiery destruction of London before taking readers on a thrilling journey through a crucial turning point in English history as seen through the eyes of an extraordinary cast of historical characters. While the central events of this significant year were ones of devastation and defeat, 1666 also offers a glimpse of the incredible scientific and artistic progress being made at that time, from Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity to the establishment of The London Gazette. It was in this year that John Milton completed Paradise Lost, Frances Stewart posed for the iconic image of Britannia, and a young architect named Christopher Wren proposed a plan for a new London—a stone phoenix to rise from the charred ashes of the old city. With flair and style, 1666 exposes readers to a city and a country on the cusp of modernity and a series of events that altered the course of history.
Author: Charles River Editors
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781976075858
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the disasters *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading In the 14th century, a ruthless killer stalked the streets of England, wiping out up to 60% of the terror-stricken nation's inhabitants. This invisible and unforgiving terminator continued to harass the population for hundreds of years, but nothing could compare to the savagery it would unleash 3 centuries later. This conscienceless menace was none other than the notorious bubonic plague, also known as the "Black Death." The High Middle Ages had seen a rise in Western Europe's population in previous centuries, but these gains were almost entirely erased as the plague spread rapidly across all of Europe from 1346-1353. With a medieval understanding of medicine, diagnosis, and illness, nobody understood what caused Black Death or how to truly treat it. As a result, many religious people assumed it was divine retribution, while superstitious and suspicious citizens saw a nefarious human plot involved and persecuted certain minority groups among them. Though it is now widely believed that rats and fleas spread the disease by carrying the bubonic plague westward along well-established trade routes, and there are now vaccines to prevent the spread of the plague, the Black Death gruesomely killed upwards of 100 million people, with helpless chroniclers graphically describing the various stages of the disease. It took Europe decades for its population to bounce back, and similar plagues would affect various parts of the world for the next several centuries, but advances in medical technology have since allowed researchers to read various medieval accounts of the Black Death in order to understand the various strains of the disease. Furthermore, the social upheaval caused by the plague radically changed European societies, and some have noted that by the time the plague had passed, the Late Middle Ages would end with many of today's European nations firmly established. In the 17th century, the people of London could boast that they had developed some of the most advanced firefighting technology and methods in the world, including the use of primitive fire engines. There were even vendors of such machines who advertised in papers of their machines' abilities to quench great fires. Of course, even with trained firefighters and new devices, the most skillful efforts could still prove limited in the face of a giant fire, as Rome had learned over 1500 years earlier and as Chicago would learn nearly 200 years later. In fact, one of the primary reasons London developed ways to fight fires was the fact that the city was particularly vulnerable. Although London was over 1500 years old and sat at the heart of the British Empire, most of the buildings were made of wood, and the city was overcrowded, in part due to the fact that city planners worked with and around the ancient Roman fortifications that had been constructed to defend it. As such, while there were spacious areas for the elite and rich outside of the city, London itself had narrow streets full of wood buildings that were practically on top of each other. With some bad luck and bad timing, a potential disaster awaited the city, and that finally came in September 1666. As it turned out, the Great Fire of London was so bad that one author who studied the blaze described it as "the perfect fire," referring to the convergence in the largest city in England of spark, wood and wind in such a way that no one could stop the fire or even fight it effectively. The fire lasted three days, and by the end of it, Londoners were shocked by the wide-scale destruction, which was so great that Samuel Pepys remarked, "It made me weep to see it." In the aftermath, people looked for scapegoats, ranging from King Charles II to the Pope and his Catholic supporters, while England's leaders looked to rebuild the city.
