The Texas City disaster began with a fire in a fertilizer ship's hold — and the captain's sensible, fatal decision to seal the hatches. This is the story of the 1947 Texas City disaster: the deadliest industrial accident in American history, and the lawsuit that became the first class action ever filed against the United States government.Sources & further reading:U.S. Coast Guard Board of Investigation, Record of Proceedings — Texas City Disaster (1947)Dalehite v. United States, 346 U.S. 15 (1953)Texas City Disaster Relief Act, Pub. L. 84-378, 69 Stat. 707 (1955)Texas City Disaster Photographs, Houston & Texas History Research Collection, University of Houston Libraries Special CollectionsUniversal-International Newsreel, "Texas Blast" (April 1947), via Prelinger ArchivesMinutaglio & Davis, Disaster in the Gulf (2018)Credits:Photographs and footage: Texas City Disaster Photographs, Houston & Texas History Research Collection, University of Houston Libraries Special Collections; Jim Evans, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Houston-media, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Prelinger Archives; Library of Congress; Chronicling America (Library of Congress).Narrated by Harper.Music: Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC-BY 4.0More strange true history: youtube.com/@skippedpagesChapters:0:00 The Smoke Over the Grandcamp2:39 The Cargo Nobody Feared3:48 The Explosion4:34 The Fire Department5:42 The Second Ship7:19 Five Hundred and Eighty-One7:53 The Country Answers8:55 The Government in the Paper Bags9:48 Dalehite v. United States10:46 Four to Three11:32 Relief, Not JusticeNew stories every week — follow Skipped Pages so the next one's waiting for you.

The Tuskegee syphilis study ran for forty years: the United States Public Health Service told six hundred men in Macon County, Alabama, that it was treating their "bad blood," while the study was built to run until every man was dead and autopsied. When penicillin became the standard cure for syphilis, the Service kept it from them — even striking their names from wartime draft-board treatment lists. This is the paper trail: the letters, the journals, the memos, and the one investigator who spent six years objecting inside the system before he went to the press.Narrated by Harper.Music: Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC-BY 4.0More strange true history: youtube.com/@skippedpages

The 1900 Galveston hurricane is still the deadliest natural disaster in American history, and the warning that could have emptied the city was stopped in writing eleven days before landfall. Forecasters in Havana had the storm pointed at Texas — this is the record of their forecast, the letter that halted its telegrams, and the city that had already been told not to worry.Narrated by Harper.Music: Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC-BY 4.0More strange true history: youtube.com/@skippedpages

In 1917, young women painting watch dials with radium paint were taught to point their brushes with their lips — and told it was perfectly safe: the Radium Girls. The story is usually told as a tragedy of ignorance, but the buried record shows the company commissioned the science, buried the result, and paid doctors who called the dying women syphilis cases — this is what the paper trail actually says.Narrated by Harper.Music: Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC-BY 4.0More strange true history: youtube.com/@skippedpagesChapters:0:00 The Glow on the Walk Home1:16 Today: The Radium Girls1:32 The Textbook Version2:13 The Studio Floor — Lip, Dip, Paint4:20 They Knew — Lead Screens and Buried Studies6:36 The Sickness — Radium Jaw8:35 The Fight — New Jersey10:34 Ottawa — Catherine Donohue11:36 The Record They Left BehindNew stories every week — follow Skipped Pages so the next one's waiting for you.

In 1897, Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée convinced his country — and Alfred Nobel — that a hydrogen balloon could drift straight over the North Pole. On July 11, the balloon Örnen rose from Danskøya, Svalbard… and the steering tore away in the first seconds of flight.What followed was a 65-hour death ride through an Arctic storm, a three-month march across drifting pack ice, and then — silence. For 33 years, nobody knew where Andrée, Nils Strindberg, and Knut Frænkel had gone. Until a sealing ship landed on Kvitøya in 1930 and found the boat, the diaries… and Strindberg's frozen camera film.This is the story the photographs told.Narrated by Harper.Music: Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC-BY 4.0More strange true history: youtube.com/@skippedpages

In June 1783, the ground in southern Iceland split open along a 25-kilometer fissure — and kept erupting for eight months: the Laki eruption. It didn't bury a city in a day; it killed slowly — fluorine poisoned the grass, livestock died in staggering numbers, and up to a quarter of Iceland's people starved in the famine the Icelanders called the Mist Hardships.But the poison didn't stay in Iceland. A sulfurous dry fog settled over Europe — the "Laki haze." The sun rose blood-red, harvests failed, and Benjamin Franklin, watching from Paris, was among the first to link an eruption to the weather of a whole hemisphere. Historians still debate whether the volcanic winter that followed helped set the date for the French Revolution.Narrated by Harper.Music: Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC-BY 4.0More strange true history: youtube.com/@skippedpagesChapters:0:00 The Laki Eruption Begins, June 8, 17832:47 The Mist Hardships: Fluorine Poisons Iceland4:50 The Fire Mass at Kirkjubæjarklaustur5:38 The Laki Haze Covers Europe6:59 Benjamin Franklin Blames a Volcano9:16 Did Laki Help Cause the French Revolution?New stories every week — follow Skipped Pages so the next one's waiting for you.

On July 19, 2018, a duck boat sank on Table Rock Lake near Branson, Missouri. Seventeen people died. Everyone blamed the storm — but the NTSB's own files tell a different story. Nineteen years earlier, another duck boat sank in Arkansas, and investigators flagged the exact design flaw that would trap passengers in Branson. Twenty-two safety recommendations followed. Almost none of them became law.This is the story of the warnings nobody read.Narrated by Harper.Music: Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC-BY 4.0More strange true history: youtube.com/@skippedpages

In March 1848, two little girls in Hydesville, New York — the Fox sisters — started talking to the dead — and for forty years, America hung on every knock. This is the story of Maggie and Kate Fox, the mysterious rappings, the murdered peddler in the cellar, and the Spiritualist movement they launched. Then came the confession at the Academy of Music in 1888... the retraction a year later... and the bones found in 1904. The record is on the table; the verdict is yours.Narrated by Harper.Music: Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC-BY 4.0More strange true history: youtube.com/@skippedpages