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  • Mississippi River flood of 1927

    flooding of the lower Mississippi River valley in April 1927, one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States. More than 23,000 square miles (60,000 square km) of land was submerged, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, and around 250 people died.

  • Jonestown

    Jonestown

    On November 18, 1978, in what became known as the “Jonestown Massacre,” more than 900 members of an American cult died in a mass suicide-murder under the direction of their leader Jim Jones.

  • Northridge earthquake of 1994

    earthquake that struck the densely populated San Fernando Valley in southern California, U.S., on Jan. 17, 1994. The third major earthquake to occur in the state in 23 years (after the 1971 San Fernando Valley and 1989 San Francisco–Oakland earthquakes), the Northridge earthquake was the state's most destructive one since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the costliest one in U.

  • Challenger Disaster

    Challenger Disaster

    In January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke up after liftoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

An unlikely series of mechanical and human errors in Unit 2 of the nuclear generating plant at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979 resulted in an accident that profoundly affected the utility industry. A complicated combination of stuck valves, misread gauges, and poor decisions led to a partial meltdown of the reactor core and a release of significant amounts of radioactive gases. The near-total devastation of the nuclear power industry resulted, because the disaster at Three Mile Island tipped the scales in the ongoing controversy over nuclear power in favor of those opposed to it. Massive demonstrations followed the accident, culminating in a rally in New York City that attracted upward of 200,000 people. By the mid-1980s, the construction of nuclear power plants in the United States had virtually ceased.

The radioactive gases released by the accident prompted the governor of Pennsylvania to evacuate pregnant women from the area. An investigation by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission claimed that the amount of radioactivity released was not a health threat, but antinuclear activists and many local citizens disputed this. The reactor itself remained unusable-in fact, virtually unapproachable-more than a decade later.

The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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This Day in History

May 27

Lead Story

Bismarck sunk by Royal Navy, 1941

On May 27, 1941, the British navy sinks the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic near France. The German death toll was more than 2,000. On…

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