The Year Without a Summer

In June of 1816, snow fell on Vermont and killing frost swept through New England in the middle of what should have been the growing season. Frost returned in July and again in August, the corn crop collapsed across the northern states, and families who grew their own food watched a year's survival vanish from the fields. Nobody in America knew why.

In this episode I trace the answer back 14 months and 10,000 miles to Mount Tambora in the Indonesian archipelago, where the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history blew away the top mile of a mountain in April of 1815, killed on the order of 100,000 people, and threw a veil of sulfur into the stratosphere that dimmed the sun over the entire planet.

I walk through the eyewitness accounts collected by Stamford Raffles, the science of how a single eruption starves a hemisphere, and the American year that followed, the dead sheared sheep, the sunspot panic, the mackerel dinners, the seed corn crisis of 1817, and the preachers who read the failed summer as divine judgment. The cold pushed thousands of families out of New England and helped fill Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and it carried one Vermont farm family to Palmyra, New York, where their 10-year-old son Joseph Smith would grow up to found an American religion.

Across the Atlantic the same volcanic winter brought famine to Switzerland, typhus to Ireland, and bread riots to England, and it trapped Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori in a rain-locked villa on Lake Geneva, where a ghost story contest produced Frankenstein and the modern vampire in the same month.

From the buried kingdom of Tambora to the frost-killed cornfields of Vermont, this is the story of the Year Without a Summer, told through the diaries, ledgers, and letters of people who lived through a climate disaster no one on earth could explain.


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Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.

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