This happened not in 1945 but in 1917—in Halifax, N.S. It was the largest man-made explosion before Hiroshima. The French freighter Mont Blanc, en route from New York to Bordeaux, entered the ...

Some in the fire-ravaged city have taken to laying personal blame. But what endures from the Canadian disaster is the generosity of those who helped rebuild.

The Halifax explosion on December 6, 1917 wiped out six square kilometres of the city. It was the largest manmade explosion the world had known. (National Archives of Canada) Ships carrying ...

Mackey — whose story we know thanks largely to the historian Janet Maybee’s book “Aftershock: The Halifax Explosion and the Persecution of Pilot Francis Mackey” — was tasked with guiding ...