Word: lisbon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kendrick, director of the British Museum, shows how the earthquake set a generation of robust optimists to muttering of doomsday. Most people in Europe believed that the earthquake was a divine visitation like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Portugal, the church was convinced that the people of Lisbon had been punished for not being good Roman Catholics; in Protestant England, the pulpits had it that Lisbon had been leveled because of the vices of Portuguese popery (although Preacher Thomas Alcock asked: "If popish superstition and cruelty made Lisbon fall, how came Rome to stand?"). It was widely expected...
Kendrick's book is one of two new case studies of catastrophe; the second concerns the collapse of Scotland's famed Tay Bridge, more than 100 years after the Lisbon quake. The two books make a fascinating contrast in the changing moral fashions surrounding disaster...
Fish & Chips. The Lisbon quake began at 9:30 a.m. on All Saints' Day, Saturday. Nov. 1, 1755. As modern earthquakes go (100,000 perished in the Tokyo-Yokohama area in 1923), it was no great shakes: it killed probably no more than 15,000 people out of a population of about 275,000. But to its contemporaries all over Europe, it was the greatest disaster since the flood...
...looters (including five Irishmen) were executed. The quake destroyed a great many of the city's 40-odd churches and 90 convents, as well as the "best fish market in the world." London and Hamburg sent food, building materials and money, but the principal aftereffect of the Lisbon shock was sermonizing...
...Candide. Voltaire used the Lisbon affair to demolish the fashionable interpretation of the Leibnitz philosophy by which every happening was necessary and therefore good. Candide and Dr. Pangloss had a terrible time in the earthquake, despite their good characters; only a "brutal sailor" did well out of the disaster, happy in the ruins with loot, wine and women. Thus Voltaire derided the notion that those who have bad luck must deserve it. Some men as sensible as Voltaire, and more charitable, recalled what Jesus said on the occasion of a mishap in the Holy Land: "Those eighteen, upon whom...