Scrawled Shortcuts through the Research Maze
Take a break from campus blackouts and Halloween preparations to investigate great scary moments of the past.
Encyclopedia of New York City
Information about NYC Blackouts---…aside from the famous ones in 1965 and 1977, did you know there were NYC blackouts as early as 1881?
REF 974.71003 E56e
Engineering Disasters and Learning from Failure
From the space shuttle Columbia to Chernobyl and Bhopal, technology plays an increasing role in 20th and 21st century disasters.
http://www.matscieng.sunysb.edu/disaster/
From the Titanic to the Challenger: An Annotated Bibliography on Technological Failures of the 20th Century
Reading list on our best known engineering catastrophes.
REF 016.620042H567f
Space Shuttle Disaster
Physicist Richard P. Feynman was among those who deduced the 0-ring failure in the Space Shuttle.* *His description of the investigation:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt
Encyclopedia of Forensic Science
CSI information, as well as investigation of the TWA-800 crash.
REF 363.2503 B433
EM-DAT: International Disasters Database
Check out stats for major disasters 1900-2005, by type, place, and date.
http://www.em-dat.net/
See also Worst United States Disasters, from Infoplease:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001459.html
Databases of the past
Read about disasters of the 19th and 20th centuries via New York Times Historical and Readers Guide Retrospective on the Research Resources page.