Episode Notes:
In 1816, summer never came. Crops failed in June. It snowed in July. Families across the Northern Hemisphere watched their harvests die in the ground and had no idea why. A volcano on the other side of the world — Mount Tambora in Indonesia — had erupted the year before with a force so massive it put enough material into the atmosphere to change the climate of an entire hemisphere. The people starving in Vermont and Ireland and Bengal had never heard of it.
Host Shawn Spainhour takes you through the full story: the eruption of Tambora in April 1815, the slow creep of its effects across the globe, the famines and food riots and mass migrations it triggered, the new strain of cholera it helped unleash, and the strange red sunsets that painters couldn’t stop painting. And on the shores of Lake Geneva, a young woman named Mary Shelley — stuck indoors through a cold, dark Swiss summer — sat down and invented Frankenstein.
Strange Epochs tells true stories from history’s stranger corners. Each episode is written for deep listening — slow, atmospheric, and immersive. Whether you’re behind the wheel, unwinding after a long day, or settling in for sleep, this show is built to pull you in and carry you somewhere else.
Sources are listed in the show notes:
- Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World. Princeton University Press, 2014.
- Post, John D. The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
- Wikipedia contributors. Year Without a Summer. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
- Wikipedia contributors. 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
- National Park Service. 1816: The Year Without Summer. U.S. National Park Service, 2022.
- Britannica editors. Mount Tambora eruption. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.
- Oppenheimer, Clive. Eruptions That Shook the World. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
- Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Lackinton, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones, 1818.
- U.S. Geological Survey. New England’s 1816 Mackerel Year, Volcanoes and Climate Change Today. 2017.