Over the course of the 1810s, a string of volcanic
eruptions spewed layer upon layer of debris into the atmosphere. In 1812,
volcanoes in the Caribbean and Indonesia began the darkening of the skies. They
were joined by a volcano in Japan in 1813 and another in the Phillipines in
1814. After rumblings in Indonesia around Mount Tambora, locals were worried
about another major eruption. Fortunately, the volcano merely spat out a
small cloud and then settled back to dormancy.
The world took little notice as beautiful weather settled
in that summer. Following years of poor crops, the harvest was good. The next
summer, 1816, was even more glorious, and record crops prompted it to be dubbed
"The Year of Summer." It was believed to be a gift from God following
the end of untold human destruction that plagued Europe and North America in
the Napoleonic Wars. The skies were noted as being delightfully blue, a color
that later played great importance in the landscape paintings of J.M.W.
Turner.
The Golden Summer was noted by the Romantic writers,
particularly Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and the Shelleys, who
vacationed in Switzerland that summer. They spent weeks hiking in the mountains,
swimming in streams, and exploring valleys.
The inspiration from nature caused them to promote English literature
leaving behind the dark tales of the Gothic and focus on bright exploits. Lord
Byron suggested they write the most adventurous stories they could. While Byron and Percy Shelley produced a
number of exciting poetry, Polidori and Mary Shelley became famous for their
works. Influenced by Byron’s reference to a great explorer in fantastical lands
like those out of Sinbad and the Thousand
and One Nights, Polidori reinvigorated the fantasy hero as had been seen in
Baron Munchausen and Cyrano de Bergerac. Later authors such as Bram Stoker
would add their own swashbuckling agents of fortune in foreign lands to the
popular genre. Mary Shelley, meanwhile, produced a vision of science
reinvigorating the dead, making for a world populated by men and women hundreds
of years old. Her science fiction inspired other authors, and later inventors,
to follow suit in imagining and creating better worlds.
On a more widespread level, with plentiful oats and a
sudden burst of the horse population, the cost of owning horses drastically
fell. Families that had never before been able to own horses during the thin
years of the wars could now afford several. Horse-riding and travel expanded
throughout Europe and the rest of the world, prompting German inventor Karl
Drais to perfect road designs created by Scot John Loudon Macadam by
combining drainage with the French ideals of smaller surface stones and
the Arabian use of oil tar to bind materials together. Within decades, the
roads in Europe cut travel time to days rather than weeks.
The warm weather also contributed to the growth of
northern populations, particularly the American Northeast. Following the
Hartford Convention and the embarrassment of suggesting separate peace after
the War of 1812 had ended, the Federalist Party struggled to recreate its
identity. Rufus King narrowly lost his bid in New York against
Democratic-Republican Daniel D. Tompkins in April of 1816, and Federalist
leaders determined to create a platform that would win over New Yorkers as a
battleground. When Tompkins began running for Vice-President of the United
States that fall, the Federalists successfully spun the Democratic-Republicans
as ignoring home in place of nationalistic fervor. Their calls for stronger home-rule
moderated them, and the party reaffirmed itself in the North on national
economic investment policies with libertarian local law. Home-rule on social
issues such as slavery later broke the Democratic-Republican party
into two, creating the three main political forces in the United States. Each
was largely regional with the Democrats in the South, Republicans in the
middle, and the Federalists in the Northeast.
National politics suddenly required a cross-party coalition to perform
any political action.
Federalist leader and Governor of Vermont Joseph Smith
helped maintain the unity of the party in the North and successfully expanded
it with pro-Westward expansion politics. He found allies among the
Republicans who were eager for settlement of land without slavery. The
Democrats fought to expand slavery but ultimately were squelched by national
ideals. Some Democrats called for secession to defend self-rule, but the
Civil War of 1856-58 brought them back into the fold.
--
In reality, Mount Tambora's eruption was
massive, ejecting more than one hundred thousand cubic kilometers of
tephra (volcanic debris), four times the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull that
grounded European air travel for several days. So much ash went into the
atmosphere that it is estimated the average global land temperature dropped by nearly
1 degree C. Nearly three hundred thousand people died in the resulting
famine due to August frosts, disease due to migrating population, and flooding.
Combined with years of low solar activity known as the Dalton
Minimum, Tambora enabled 1816 to be called the "Year Without
Summer." The famine did have other effects, such as depopulating Joseph
Smith’s home state of Vermont, Drais’s creation of a precursor to the bicycle,
and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and
Polidori’s “The Vampyre.”
In 1591,on May 15 in the courtyard of the Uglich Fortress, Maria Nagaya frustrated a brutal assassination attempt by Boris Godunov's agents to kill her ten year son Dmitry Ivanovich, the Tsarevich of Russia. 
