Ten Years of Winter: The Cold Decade and Environmental Consciousness in the Early 19th Century

Between 1810 and 1820, a series of volcanic eruptions around the world caused a temporary global climate change with dramatic effects, the most famous of them being the "Year Without Summer" (1816). This research attempts to understand how people in the English-speaking world understood and evaluated these anomalies, and what their reactions tell us about the state of scientific thinking, environmental consciousness, and how their worlds—both global and local—were constructed.