<p><span class="deck"> THUS SPAKE THE GREAT INDIAN CHIEF TECUMSEH, PREDICTING— SOME BELIEVED—THE SERIES OF VIOLENT EARTHQUAKES THAT STRUCK THE MIDWEST IN THE WINTER OF 1811–12</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck">When The Great Earthquake struck New England, learned men blamed everything from God’s wrath to an overabundance of lightning rods in Boston. Two hundred and twenty-five years later, geologists are at last discovering the true causes.</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> Sixty-eight years before Mount St. Helens blew, Alaska’s Mount Katmai erupted—and nearly brought on a second ice age</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> An all-but-forgotten San Francisco photographer has left us a grand and terrible record of the destruction and rebirth of an American city</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The storm that wrecked the Virginia-bound ship Sea Venture in 1609 inspired a play by Shakespeare— and the survivors’ tribulations may well have sown the first seeds of democracy in the New World</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">The Great Lakes hurricane of 1913 was a destructive freak. As far as lakers were concerned, it was …</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">We talk about it constantly and we arrange our lives around it. So did our parents; and so did the very first colonists. But it took Americans a long time to understand their weather, and we still have trouble getting it right.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">How Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture sent an eccentric Russian mystic on a sensitive mission to Asia and thereby created diplomatic havoc, personal humiliation, and embarrassment for the administration.</span></p>
