Nine small islands, called the Isles of Shoals, lie off the coast just over the line between New Hampshire and Maine. One of them, Smuttynose Island, has a mysterious past. Traditional stories going back to the early 19th century, amplified by poetry, folklore and modern tour-guide apocrypha, speak of a Spanish ship called the Sagunto having been wrecked on the shore of Smuttynose Island in January 1813 and fourteen (in some accounts fifteen) of its crew buried on the island by the patriarch...

In March 1815, in London, Elizabeth Fenning served a plate of dumplings to the family that employed her as a cook. Almost all members of the household, including Eliza herself, became violently ill, apparently poisoned. Barely four months later Eliza was dead, hanged for attempted murder after a drumhead trial tainted with misogyny, class prejudice and official corruption. An angry newspaper reporter who witnessed her execution, William Hone, took up her cause and began to expose the web of...

For centuries, the historic region of Lithuania, torn between its powerful European neighbors, was one of the great centers of Jewish culture and intellectual life. In the 1810s, the small town of Volozhin was the site of a uniquely influential yeshiva—a school of Jewish learning—founded by a charismatic rabbi beloved by the community, the brilliant Chaim of Volozhin. But as influential as Chaim’s own contributions were to Judaism, he was also part of a broader movement, spearheaded by an...

This brief trailer is to introduce you to Second Decade host Sean Munger's newest podcast, a fiction/alternate history show called Age of Confusion. The show examines an alternate timeline of American and world history from 1963 to 1985. Website for Age of Confusion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is a crossover episode with the Green Screen podcast. Leo Tolstoy’s epic 1869 novel War & Peace is undeniably one of the great classics of world literature. Although it covers a considerable time period, its climactic episodes involve the Napoleonic Wars and specifically the French invasion of Russia in 1812. In this, a special crossover episode with Dr. Sean Munger’s other podcast Green Screen, Sean and guest host Cody Climer delve into the 2016 BBC miniseries adaptation of War...

After being sold out by the great European powers, especially Great Britain, as a sop to Sweden, the people of Norway felt angry and betrayed. The Norwegian nobility had united behind Danish Crown Prince Christian Frederick, who had promised to lead them to independence—but Christian Frederick’s revolution increasingly looked like a long shot, particularly in the face of resistance by Sweden’s regent, former Napoleonic general Jean Bernadotte. Nevertheless, Christian Frederick and his allies...

At the beginning of the Napoleonic era, Norway was not its own country, but rather the junior partner in the unequal combination of Denmark-Norway. Just before Bonaparte was defeated and exiled (for the first time), somehow Norway ended up detached from Denmark and "unified" with Sweden, in an act of diplomatic legerdemain that left the Norwegians fuming, the Swedes boastful and just about everyone else bewildered. As it turned out, the Norwegians decided not to take their wholesale...

The bodies of dead human beings can tell us a lot about the past, but most human remains from the distant past tend to be rich or important people. A discovery in Basel, Switzerland in 1984 proved an exception to this rule when a number of skeletons were recovered from a forgotten graveyard for the city’s poor. One particular set of bones entranced researchers because of two strange notches found in his front teeth. An exhausting effort to identify the man known only as “Theo the Pipe Smoker”...

America was growing rapidly in the 1810s, and growth meant building. Buildings of all kinds, from churches, markets and houses to banks and government offices, were sprouting up everywhere. Only a tiny fraction of the many buildings constructed between 1810 and 1820 still survive today, and the loss of the majority—through demolition, development, decay, accident, neglect, or deliberate destruction—represents a staggering loss of architectural heritage and history. Though many buildings have...

The mysterious weather and climate anomalies of the Year Without Summer did not end with the coming of fall or the end of the calendar year 1816. The Tambora effect—the chilling of the world’s climate by volcanic dust from the 1815 mega-eruption—lingered long after that. The failure of summer crops in many parts of America, Europe and the world meant a lean and hungry winter for millions of people. And for many of them, the brutally cold winter of 1816-17 was much colder and more harrowing...

For many people around the world, 1816 was the oddest summer they ever lived through. Snow from the previous winter was still left in places well into the deep summer; rains and floods lashed central Europe; New England was cold and parched; and nearly everybody worried about what the anomalies were going to do to that season’s crops and foodstuffs. The effects of the strange weather ran deeper, however. It caused some people to be depressed and melancholy; others sought answers in prayers...

The “Year Without Summer,” 1816, is one of those things that many people have heard of, but very few know anything substantive about. It was the largest environmental event of the Second Decade. Two volcanic eruptions, one from an unknown mountain in 1809 and the second the disastrous blast of Mt. Tambora in April 1815, filled the atmosphere with toxic particulates and triggered a period of global temporary climate change. But what was it like on the ground to the people who lived through it?...

In the 1810s, St. John’s, Newfoundland was possibly the most remote and inaccessible corner of British America. Located on an island that was often icebound in the winter months, St. John’s was far from self-sufficient, depending on the Royal Navy for its food, building materials and governance. In February 1816, during the midst of an already dangerous winter made lean by economic depression, fire broke out on the city’s waterfront. It was only the beginning of a cycle of destruction that...

Jane Austen is rightly considered perhaps the greatest British novelist of her day, or any age. Her novels about women, marriage and family among the English gentry, especially Pride and Prejudice, have defined how we think about British society in the late Georgian and Regency eras for all time. Like almost no other person, Austen is the living historical embodiment of the 1810s, the decade that saw the publication of all of her novels—and her untimely death. But how did she come to be? What...

One of the most bizarre and mysterious cultures in human history, ancient Egypt still holds considerable interest for us today. This was even more true in the 1810s, not long after battles between France and Britain in the region of the Nile brought European travelers, scholars and opportunists to the desert to hunt for ancient Egyptian artifacts. One of the most notorious of these characters was Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a former barber and circus strong man who in 1815 became the go-to guy...

If you’ve never heard of John Caragea and have no idea where Wallachia is, you’re certainly not alone. This look at the seamy underbelly of Eastern Europe in the 1810s may be obscure, but it’s no less fascinating than anything else covered on Second Decade. Wallachia, now part of the modern nation of Romania, was 200 years ago a minor province of the Ottoman Empire, and except as a breadbasket the Turkish sultans couldn’t be bothered to care much about it. That’s why rule of provinces like...

For most of human history, Antarctica was more of a concept than a reality. Geographers from ancient times and voyagers in the Age of Discovery supposed there was a continent at the bottom of the world, but no one had actually seen it, and some, like Captain Cook, declared that there was nothing useful down there at all. Then, quite suddenly, at the end of the Second Decade, the envelope of humanity’s geographic knowledge stretched just far enough to enable discovery of the icy islands that...

It’s been a while—too long—since the last episode of Second Decade. In this brief bonus episode, Sean Munger talks to you, the listeners, about the future of the show (yes, it is continuing), some announcements of other podcasts he’s going to be on, and makes an appeal to help Kristaps Andrejson, the producer and host of the popular Eastern Border podcast, who needs your help to return home to Latvia. Please do help out, it will be greatly appreciated!Kristap’s email address, for PayPal...

This bonus episode, the third one released in conjunction with Sean Munger’s newly-released novel Jake’s 88 (which is set in the 80s), examines how the 1980s ended and the transition to a new decade. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, the year 1990 begins with an invasion of Panama by the United States to terminate the troublesome narco-dictator Manuel Noriega, an episode that serves as a sort of dress rehearsal for a much more...

This bonus episode, the second one released in conjunction with Sean Munger’s upcoming novel Jake’s 88 (which is set in the 80s), examines the political, cultural and social history of the 1980s. Sean begins with two dreadful disasters in 1988 involving airliners being blown out of the sky, one over the Persian Gulf, the other over Scotland, and how both were related to the most destructive war of the 20th century, excluding the two world wars, which almost drew in the United States. Pivoting...

 In the summer of 1817, residents of the coastal town of Gloucester, Massachusetts suddenly began seeing a mysterious creature swimming around in their harbor. Though reports differed as to exactly what the monster looked like, how long it was and how fast it could move, the similarities between the reports and the trustworthiness of the witnesses seemed too substantial to ignore. A scientific association quickly convened a committee to investigate the creature. But the Gloucester sea monster...

This bonus episode, released in conjunction with Sean Munger’s upcoming novel Jake’s 88 (which is set in the 80s), examines the political, cultural and social history of the 1980s and why, far from being simply a grab-bag of pop culture tropes, this decade stands at the very heart of modern history. Beginning with an almost incredible snap decision made in a Detroit hotel room that completely changes the next 40 years of history, this roving spotlight on various aspects of the decade also...

“Waterloo” is a name so historic and iconic that it’s taken on more than its literal meaning—when we speak of someone “meeting their Waterloo,” we’re talking about their final epic defeat. Napoleon Bonaparte certainly did meet that end on the farm fields of Belgium in June 1815, but the story of how his brief restoration as France’s Emperor came crashing down is more than just the story of a single battle. Historians since 1815 have been more guilty than anyone else at distorting and...

In retellings of history, Napoleon’s brief return to power in the spring of 1815 is often portrayed as an audacious surprise, the ultimate comeback from an indefatigable historical personality. Actually it wasn’t. Having returned to Paris and run off the rickety reboot of the Bourbon monarchy, Napoleon immediately found himself faced with a dizzying array of insoluble problems. Chief among them was the fact that all the other powers of Europe had suddenly banded together and declared war on...