Literary Giants: The Children's Blizzard

The morning of January 12, 1888, dawned so unseasonably mild that many children in the Midwest walked to school without heavy coats or gloves. That afternoon, the quiet skies broke suddenly into a raging chaos of hurricane-force winds and blinding snows. Thousands of people, many of them schoolchildren returning home from class, were stranded in this bone-numbing blizzard. By the next morning, more than 500 people lay dead, many of them children caught just a few yards from shelter. David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard captures a weather event so horrific that its savage blasts are still remembered in Nebraska, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.