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After The Apocalypse: A Comparative Study Of The Black Death, London Fire, And Lisbon Earthquake, Gregory Zacharia
After The Apocalypse: A Comparative Study Of The Black Death, London Fire, And Lisbon Earthquake, Gregory Zacharia
History Honors Projects
This thesis conducts a comparative study of historical responses to natural disasters by examining the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the 1666 Great Fire of London, and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. In doing so, I employ an interdisciplinary framework by adapting the theory of path dependence to my analysis of prominent historical disasters. With this theoretical structure, I suggest that natural disasters cause moments of uncertainty that often produce critical junctures at key moments of development in the societies they affect. In the first and third chapters, I explore how the Black Death and the Lisbon earthquake served as …