San Francisco's 1906 earthquake killed far more people than officials admitted

The April 1906 earthquake and the fires it triggered destroyed most of San Francisco and left roughly 250,000 people homeless. City officials recorded about 478 deaths, a figure long repeated in textbooks. Decades of research by historian Gladys Hansen put the true toll above 3,000, deliberately minimized at the time to protect the city's reputation and reassure investors.

— Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 — HarperCollins, 2005
Go deeper: get the book →