The history of American cities is probably the most mysterious and controversial layer of world history. On the territory of the modern United States of America in the 19th century, a series of devastating urban fires occurred. Over the course of a hundred years, American cities have been burned down at an astonishing rate - about one a year. These were both small cities and large ones.
All of these fires have one thing in common: firstly, there is a very small number of people killed during the fire. For example, 287 people died during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. 17.5 thousand buildings were destroyed. Before the fire, 324 thousand people lived in Chicago. 90 thousand were left homeless. A catastrophic fire occurred in a large city, 17.5 thousand buildings were burnt out and at the same time a very small number of deaths was less than 300 people!
This trend can be traced in other American cities: the city is completely burned out, and there are very few deaths.
The second feature is the photographs of the ruins.
In all the photographs, we see a huge number of destroyed stone and brick buildings. Nothing strange, it seems. But according to the descriptions of historians, American cities were almost entirely built of wood and therefore so often burned down for minor reasons. Historians write: wooden cities burned down. But the photographs are almost always ruins of stone. It looks very contradictory.
The next interesting pattern is the preserved trees and wooden posts. In the photographs, we see completely burnt-out and destroyed brick buildings, and at the same time there are almost whole trees around these buildings, some even have preserved foliage. And this is very strange! It was as if a fiery tornado passed through the city, sweeping away everything in its path, but for some reason he did not touch the trees and wooden pillars.
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Another common feature is the fantastically fast recovery of cities after fire. According to historians, tens of thousands of buildings were built in a year, and all this using only horses and carts. Also striking is the speed of clearing cities from construction waste. In Chicago and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of tons of the remains of burnt houses were removed. What technique was used to do this is unclear. But if you look at the photographs, you get the impression that powerful bulldozers have walked through the city and cleared all the streets.
Another important point is the lack of photographs that captured the stage of the city's recovery after the fire. We have photographs of buildings before and after the fire, followed by a series of photographs of completely rebuilt cities. There are practically no photographs showing the intermediate stages of construction. Simply put, at first we see the ruins, and then completely from the built-in city, although this is already the end of the 19th century and photography is no longer exotic, but quite an ordinary thing. Also, all new buildings have no surviving paper drawings or other technical documentation.
Very often these buildings are attributed to the work of mythical architects. Another feature is people. They are all somewhat similar to each other: these people are of about the same age, very similarly dressed, and they wander through the ruins like tourists, as if they were specially brought to the destroyed city for some unknown purpose.
It is all the more strange that a very small number of residents of the city died in the fires, but these people in black bear little resemblance to the fire victims. For some reason I don't associate them with ordinary city dwellers, there is something sinister about them. Or does it just seem so to me?
In the United States in the 19th century, about a hundred cities burned down, and almost all of them have all these features that I have listed.
If you follow the official story, then we quickly fall into a logical dead end, and here's why.
Here is what the historian writes about the fire in Chicago: "after the fire stopped, the smoldering remains were still so hot that the authorities could not even assess the damage caused by the fire, they waited several days to move around the ruins." It seems that there is nothing interesting in this phrase, but the preserved trees refute the data on a large recent fire, because they simply had to completely burn out. We have ruins, there are practically whole trees, and one contradicts the other.
And here we see the ruins of San Francisco. Several years have passed, and the city has already been restored. But such a pace of construction is practically unrealistic for the beginning of the 20th century, and even more so for the end of the 19th, when the cities were cleared and rebuilt. For several years, thousands of publications a year were erected, and from the equipment in the photographs we see only carts and horses.
This is how the history of American cities looks like in the official version. First, the city was built, then the ruins, and in a few years the whole city again stands without traces of fire. I think these pictures are in the wrong order. They should be arranged like this: first, the ruins, then tourists walk along the ruins, and then a modern city appears. Then it's very easy for us to arrange everything in chronological order. And the cities were rebuilt not in the mythical five years, but in quite real 15-20 years. Take, for example, San Francisco after the 1906 fire. Three years later, we see that most of the city has been restored. Only three years - and what a result! It just wasn't without the intervention of some fantastic technique!
Just imagine, the rubble after the collapse in 2001 of the Twin Towers in New York was cleared with the help of modern technology for three years. In our time, modern technology cleared the rubble after the collapse of three buildings for three years, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, in three years they cleared and rebuilt the whole city, which is simply incredible.
This is what the history of the settlement of the American continent looks like in my opinion.
1861 year. A huge expeditionary force has landed on the territory of America.
These people examined new territories, removed corpses, repaired bridges, made maps of new lands. This period is preserved in old photographs, it was simply called differently - the mythical civil war in the United States. So, almost all photographs of the so-called war show ordinary scenes of inspection of new territories, repair of bridges, and sketches of destroyed cities. And almost all of the photographs show soldiers from only one side. That is why it was not a war, but an ordinary expedition to inspect empty territories. Therefore, there are no soldiers of the other belligerent in the photographs, and everywhere we see scenes from a peaceful life.
After this expedition, photographs of destroyed cities appeared.
So for the first time people saw Boston, Chicago, San Francisco. These cities were already in ruins. What destroyed them is a topic for a separate article.
Inspection and appropriation of territories ended in 1865, and immediately after that photographs appeared in which new settlers are curiously exploring the ruins of a past civilization.
Then 15-20 years pass, and photographs of completely rebuilt cities appear. And all this happens at a regular pace. I do not see anything surprising in the fact that Chicago moved from one state to another after 30 years. It's just that we are shown the wrong sequence of events.
This also explains the presence of whole trees in the ruins of cities. These trees grew after the fire, before the 1861 expedition discovered these ruins. These cities have already been destroyed for several decades, and new trees and shrubs have already grown. As for the surviving wooden poles in the photographs, these are already new poles that people from the 1861 expedition erected to cover new lands by telegraph communication.
This sequence of American history seems to me more plausible. Everything fits neatly into the usual technical possibilities of the 19th century. At first there were ruins, and after 30 years - a modern city.
But in what year cities on the whole continent were destroyed, I will tell you in the next article. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel if you haven't already.