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.

If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you.

On the morning of May 23rd, 1618, a group of Protestant noblemen marched into the royal council chamber of Prague Castle and threw three men out of a window. The drop was seventy feet. All three survived. Catholics said it was angels. Protestants said it was a dung heap. Both sides immediately printed pamphlets. And within months, the Thirty Years War had begun — a conflict that would kill up to eleven million people and permanently reshape the relationship between religion and political power in the Western world.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the centuries of religious tension between Catholic and Protestant powers in central Europe, the fragile Bohemian nobility and their collision with Habsburg authority, and the three men who fell from that window and set an entire continent on fire. This episode follows the chain of consequence from a single morning in Prague all the way to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 — the settlement that laid the foundation for the modern nation-state and the separation of church and state.

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:

• Wilson, Peter H. The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy. Harvard University Press, 2009.
• Parker, Geoffrey. The Thirty Years War. Routledge, second edition, 1987.
• Wikipedia contributors. Defenestrations of Prague. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Britannica editors. Defenestration of Prague. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.
• German History in Documents and Images. The War Begins: The Defenestration of Prague, May 1618. German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., 2023.
• Slavata, Wilhelm. Personal memoir and account of the defenestration, circa 1620–1630. Referenced in Wilson and Parker.
• Public Domain Review. Windows Onto History: The Defenestrations of Prague. 2024.
• Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. Out the Window: Religion, Politics, and a Defenestration in Prague. Ohio State University, 2018.

If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you.

In 1932, the Australian government deployed soldiers and machine guns to the Western Australian outback to deal with a crisis threatening the livelihoods of desperate farmers. The enemy: twenty thousand emus. What followed was one of the most absurd military operations in recorded history — and the emus won, decisively and without any apparent awareness that they had done so.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the First World War veterans who had been given land by a grateful government and then abandoned to the grinding economics of the Great Depression, the annual emu migration that had been crossing that same land for millions of years before anyone planted wheat on it, and the three-week campaign that produced nine hundred confirmed kills out of twenty thousand birds and became the national punchline of a story that started as a desperate plea for help.

The Great Emu War is funny. It is also, if you sit with it long enough, quietly heartbreaking.

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:

• Wikipedia contributors. Emu War. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Serventy, Dominic. Observations on the Emu War. Referenced in ornithological records, 1932–1933.
• Britannica editors. Emu War. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2023.
• National Geographic. The Bizarre Story of When Australia Went to War with Emus and Lost. 2024.
• Beyer, Greg. The Great Emu War: When Australians Lost to Flightless Birds. The Collector, 2023.
• Meredith, Major G.P.W. Official Report on the Emu Cull Operations, Campion District, Western Australia. Royal Australian Artillery, December 1932.
• The Melbourne Argus. Various reports on the Emu War. November through December, 1932.
• History Hit. The Great Emu War: How Flightless Birds Beat the Australian Army. 2023.