The end of the world
By: edited by Lewis H. Lapham with Peter T. Struck.
Contributors: Lapham, Lewis H.; Struck, Peter T.
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 297
Subjects: Disasters.; History -- Miscellanea.; Prophecies.
Description: The Romans at Pompeii, the Confederates at Richmond, the German Jews in 1938 -- all had reason to believe the world was coming to an end. This fascinating collection contains works by such diverse historians as Plato, Thucydides, da Vinci, Mencken and Picasso. Famous episodes of human tragedy are recounted by those who lived them. Jack London describes the great earthquake of San Francisco in 1906; a Bolshevik watches the Winter Palace fall in 1917; a Polish poet fights for food in Auschwitz. Soldiers from ancient Rome to Vietnam march toward death; a writer toils while the Black Plague rages around him; a monk watches the Aztec Empire fall to the Spaniards.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-297).
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction by Simon Schama; title: Foreword: "The Wreck of Time" (I); title: PART I: THE RUINS OF EMPIRES; title: 3000 B.C., Shurrupak, Epic of Gilgamesh; title: 2000 B.C., Sodom, Genesis; title: 1500 B.C., Atlantis, Plato, Timaeus; title: 1250 B.C., Troy, Virgil, Aeneid; title: Circa 600 B.C., Jerusalem, Isaiah; title: 416 B.C., Melos, Thucydides,; title: The History of the Peloponnesian War; title: 146 B.C., Carthage, Polybius, Roman History; title: Circa 100 B.C., Rome, Lucretius, On the Nature of Things; title: 49 B.C., Rome, Lucan, The Civil War; title: 30 A.D., Jerusalem, Mark; title: 64, Rome, Suetonius, On Nero; title: 70, Jerusalem, Josephus, The Jewish War; title: 79, Pompeii, Pliny, Vesuvius Erupts; title: Circa 90, Armageddon, John; title: 410, Rome, Procopius, History of the Wars; title: 413, Rome, Saint Augustine, City of God; title: 800, Oengus of Clonenagh, Poem; title: 1000, Ireland After the Vikings, Anonymous Poem; title: 1099, Jerusalem, Fulcher of Chartres, Chronicle; title: 1190, Joachim of Fiore, Letter to All the Faithful; title: 1209, Beziers, Guillaume de Tudele,; title: Crusade Against the Albigensians; title: 1348, Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron; title: Circa 1400, Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah; title: 1453, Constantinople, Ducas, Decline and Fall of; title: Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks; title: 1461, Franqois Villon, "Another Ballade"; title: PART II: THE FALL OF NATIONS; title: Late 1400s, Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks; title: 1502, Christopher Columbus, Book of Prophecies; title: Early 1500s, Hispaniola, Bartolome de Las Casas,; title: A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies; title: 1527, Rome, Luigi Guicciardini, The Sack of Rome; title: 1555, Nostradamus, Oracles; title: 1595, William Shakespeare, Richard II; title: Early 1600s, John Donne, Holy Sonnet; title: 1643, Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici; title: 1649, London, Anonymous, Beheading of Charles I; title: 1665, London, Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year; title: 1745, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards,; title: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God; title: 1755, Lisbon, Anonymous, The Earthquake; title: 1759, Voltaire, Candide; title: 1755, Essaka, Olaudah Equiano,; title: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; title: 1781, Yorktown, Lord Charles Cornwallis and; title: George Washington, Letters; title: 1793, Paris, Marie Antoinette, Letter; title: 1793, Paris, Marie Antoinette's Last Supper; title: 1794, Paris, Robespierre, Address to the National Convention; title: 1796-1797, Edmund Burke,; title: "A Tremendous, Unformed Spectre"; title: 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus,; title: An Essay on the Principle of Population; title: 1826, Mary Shelley, The Last Man; title: 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"; title: 1835, The Treaty of New Echota; title: 1838, Cherokee Nation, Evan Jones, "On the Trail of Tears"; title: 1846-1847, Ireland, News Accounts and Letters,; title: The Irish Famine; title: 1859, Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species; title: 1865, Richmond, Burton N. Harrison, Jefferson Davis' Capture; title: 1865, Mary Chesnut, Fall of Richmond; title: 1865, Richmond, George Cary Eggleston,; title: A Rebel's Recollections; title: 1867, Karl Marx, Das Kapital; title: 1870-1871, Paris, Robert Sencourt, The Life of Empress Eugenie; title: 1870-1871, Paris, Archibald Forbes,; title: Dispatches to the London Daily News; title: 1890, "Ghost Dance Song"; title: 1898, C. P. Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians"; title: PART III: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE END IN A VOID; title: 1906, San Francisco, Jack London,; title: Dispatch to Collier's Weekly; title: 1910, Henry Adams, Entropy; title: 1914, Louvain, Richard Harding Davis,; title: Dispatch to the New York Tribune; title: 1917, The Hindenburg Trench, Siegfried Sassoon; title: 1917, St. Petersburg, John Reed, Seizure of the Winter Palace; title: 1918, Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West; title: 1918-1919, Count Harry Kessler, Revolution in Berlin; title: 1923, Tokyo, London Spectator, Earthquake; title: 1929, New York, The New Yorker, Crash of '29; title: 1930, Sigmund Freud, The Death Instinct; title: 1931, H. L. Mencken, The Great Depression; title: 1932, Martha's Vineyard, Henry Beetle Hough, Epitaph; title: 1944, Auschwitz, Tadeusz Borowski,; title: "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen"; title: 1944, Auschwitz, Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; title: 1945, Hiroshima, John Hersey, Hiroshima; title: 1945, Nagasaki, William L. Laurence,; title: Dispatch to The New York Times; title: 1951, Hal Boyle, Washington Under the Bomb; title: 1962, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; title: 1975, Phnom Penh, Haing S. Ngor, The Khmer Rouge; title: 1989, Peter Schneider, Collapse of the Berlin Wall; title: 1989, Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?"; title: 1993-1996; title: Time/CNN Poll, Second Coming of Jesus Christ; title: Atlantic Monthly, Newsstand Blurb; title: Bill Clinton, On "The Coming Anarchy"; title: Books in Print, "The End of"; title: The Rapture Index; title: Is Bill Gates the Next Antichrist?; title: Press Releases, The End Is Nearish!; title: End Paper: "Predicted Dates for the End of the World"; title: Afterword: "The Wreck of Time" (II); title: Sources.