6 Disasters With Details So Awful, History Left Them Out

It wasn't until six months later that teams were able to raise the ship. Inside an airtight storeroom, they found the bodies of three sailors -- Ronald Endicott, Clifford Olds, and Louis Costin -- alongside piles of opened food rations, flashlight batteries, and a freshwater tank. According to a calendar that was found in the room, the men had survived for 16 days before suffocating.

Their families were told that the men died on December 7, the day of the attack itself. It wasn't until years later that the truth came out, and even to this day, monuments list December 7 as the day of their passing. Which might not be right, but man, it also kind of feels like there might not be a right answer here.

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So what happened? Well, the lifeboats happened. After the Titanic, Congress enacted regulations which required passenger ships to carry enough lifeboats to accommodate every single passenger. Which was a big problem for river boats and their shallow drafts. The Eastland was already a bit top-heavy, and these new regulations forced it to go from six lifeboats to 11. Add in 37 life rafts and 2,000+ life jackets -- all of which were stored on the top deck -- and you had something which was less a ship and more a massive experiment in rudimentary physics.

In defense of the poor bastard who originally designed the thing, the Eastland was originally meant to haul 500 people, not 2,500. Makeshift, and apparently legal, modifications made it sort of stable when underway, but it was always a little tippy when loading and unloading. The mandatory lifeboats, as well-intended as they were, became sort of the proverbial straw which made the camel fall over and kill 800 people.

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According to human rights researchers who interviewed inmates held in a prison called Templeman III, after the floodwaters hit, the people running this prison -- guards, administrators, everyone -- up and left, abandoning 600+ prisoners in flooded cells without food or water. For four fucking days.

According to a timeline of events pieced together by these researchers, the prisoners last reported seeing guards on August 28 -- the day the hurricane came ashore and the vast majority of city residents had fled or holed themselves up inside the paradise that was forming in the Superdome. By August 29, the prison was a lawless ghost town filled with chest-high floodwaters and -- oh, cool -- turds, thanks to a backed-up sewage system.

As is their way, the inmates took matters into their own hands, some of them managing to break out of their cells to escape the rising waters. Others, in the vain hope that someone would give a shit, hung signs out of their cells begging for help -- a sight witnessed by a correctional officer at another prison. Regardless, it took until September 1 for someone to realize that, yes, they'd accidentally Home Alone'd an entire prison, and yes, they should probably get around to rescuing them.

These weren't criminal kingpins, by the way. The vast majority of inmates in this particular facility were being held for offenses like disorderly conduct or public drunkenness -- many hadn't been convicted or even charged yet. The main inmates were being held in similar prisons Templeman I and Templeman II, both of which were evacuated almost immediately, though they didn't exactly have a great time of things, either.

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The Civil Rights Movement won great things for the nation's minorities, but these victories came at a tremendous cost for the people who won them. For years, black communities suffered through protests, riots, and, let's say, " vigorous" police enforcement. And there's an even sadder case of discrimination from this time which almost no one knows about; one which put a lot of black men into mental hospitals.

Prior to the 1960s, schizophrenia was thought to be something which only middle-class women suffered, like the vapors or plodding missionary-position sex. Its symptoms, as understood at the time, matched what we'd now call depression, and it was typically chalked up to pressures related to housework and motherhood. But that all changed in 1968, with the publication of new psychiatric guidelines which reclassified schizophrenia as a disease which manifested via outbursts of ultra-violent aggression. Before, schizophrenia was treated with compassion and pity. Now, it required containment.

Guess how that turned out.

OK, we'll tell you. In the years that followed, schizophrenia diagnoses in "angry black men" skyrocketed. Moreover, a specific type of schizophrenia was suddenly discovered: paranoid schizophrenia, sufferers of which were typified as having " delusional anti-whiteness." Which sounds laughable; considering the lynching and segregation and bombings and arson and goddamned medical experimentation, it'd be delusional for a black man not to be anti-white.

The psychiatrists who changed these guidelines probably weren't being explicitly racist. But in the words of the psychiatry professor who identified the sudden trend, this change " reflected the social tensions of 1960s America." Far from being a cold, clinical decision, the new diagnosis procedures were heavily intertwined with the cultural values of the day, or at least the cultural values of white doctors, leading them to create what was essentially a modern version of " drapetomania" -- the old "illness" concocted to explain why slaves so often fled their masters.

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