Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903
On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, during a sold-out matinee performance, a fire broke out in Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre. In the short span of twenty minutes, more than six hundred people, two thirds of whom were women and children, were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death in a panicked mob’s failed attempt to escape. A century after the fire—the deadliest in American history—Nat Brandt provides the only detailed chronicle of this horrific event to assess not only the titanic tragedy of...
