Historic Painting: "San Francisco Fire" by William A. Coulter, 1906.
117 years ago today, San Francisco reaped the whirlwind. This is what it looked like.
Read next
A bird out of hand: My reminiscences on the rise and fall of Twitter.
Twitter should be destroyed. It should not exist anywhere, at any time, in any incarnation. It is evil.
The death of Hu Yaobang: The first chapter of a story that changed the world.
How the prosaic demise of a Chinese Communist bureaucrat triggered one of the most important movements in recent history.
The forgotten victim of the Lincoln assassination plot: The attack on William Seward.
While Booth was shooting Lincoln at Ford's Theater, another terrible crime was happening just blocks away.