The Year Without a Summer

Mount Tambora erupted in April 1815 with a force that remains the largest in recorded history. The following year, snow fell in New England in June.

Crops failed from Vermont to Yunnan. Bread riots broke out across Europe. In a rented house on Lake Geneva, a group of writers kept indoors by the endless rain agreed to tell ghost stories. One of them was Mary Shelley.

A volcano in Indonesia gave the world Frankenstein, the modern bicycle, and a famine that historians are still counting.