By Charlton Yingling and Marissa Yingling

“It shows, in a strong light, the heaves and throes of the burning mountain, three years, at least, before the explosion of the volcano in Massachusetts or Virginia.”[1] – John Adams, 1818

One Mountain Within Two Revolutions

In the late eighteenth century, as a revolutionary eruption founded a new country in North America, a real volcano devastated Europe. Near the Arctic Circle and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and European tectonic plates drift apart, geophysical pyroclastic flows melted geopolitics together in unanticipated ways. As the newly-founded United States found opportunity for economic recovery, environmental and emotional turbulence clouded over what was arguably the most powerful monarchy, economy, and country in Europe at the time.

For all the well-known themes and throughlines of the revolutionary era, three lesser-known convergences in 1783 offer insight into underappreciated aspects of contingencies, connections, and eruptions, both revolutionary and real. The environment weighed on human emotion, fortuitously entwining formative metaphorical and geophysical volcanoes. Discordant confluences of disaster and dissent among the United States, Iceland, and France in the 1780s complicate conventional conceits of revolutionary causation and narration.[2] Pivot points arrived for all three polities in 1783. On the surface of chronology and country boundaries, the United States, Iceland, and France were in distinct moments and different locations. Below the surface, all three had magma chambers that ruptured to define this era. Respectively, 1783 found them at the end of the colonial era, the middle of a natural disaster, and the beginning of a legitimacy crisis leading to revolution. And to varying degrees, all three contexts showed disequilibria of governments seeking short-term conditions for stability and control versus populaces thriving and surviving in the long term.

For instance, the United States used the volcano amid economic recalibration and recovery after years of alleged British commercial strictures. Icelanders experienced utter devastation, with early indications that Danish domination lacked. And finally, the French population was downstream from its government substantial funding for the United States’ independence. It was also downwind from natural disaster in Iceland. In varied ways, the reactions of humans perceiving precarity, and of government seeking security, did not align. Living conditions, bureaucratic management, and monarchical validity began to fail. Once inconceivable cascades and improbable risks connected one revolutionary end to another revolutionary beginning, through an Icelandic mountain between both their sides of the Atlantic.

Clouds Converging

In 1783, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay represented the new United States of America in France during peace negotiations to successfully conclude their war for independence from the United Kingdom. In September of that year, they signed the Treaty of Paris in which the British government conceded defeat and the independence of thirteen North American colonies.[3] In July 1775, only eight years earlier, Franklin and Jay had served on the Second Continental Congress committee that constructed the Olive Branch Petition, a final reconciliation appeal to the British monarch, King George III. In the document, they avowed their loyalty as crown subjects, their disinterest in independence, and their hope to find solutions to grievances to avoid war. Only one year later, in July 1776, Adams and Franklin added their names to the Declaration of Independence in the same building.[4] When Adams, Franklin, and Jay arrived at the treaty table in Paris, their circuitous, once unthinkable path coincided with billowing clouds for France – the first of debt, and the second of volcanic ash, both disasters for which few were prepared.

During the months of final treaty negotiations, and for months thereafter, the Lakagígar Volcano of southcentral Iceland – commonly called “Laki” – erupted. From June 1783 until February 1784, it launched lava, toxic fumes, and ash clouds into the skies. In the immediate vicinity, the volcano destroyed agriculture and contributed to the deaths of as much as twenty-five percent of the island’s population. Impacts ranged far beyond, interfering with crops in North Africa and Asian monsoons.

British naturalists described a peculiar haze and smokey fog that clogged their skies for weeks on end, causing sunlight to take on a rusty, blood-colored tinge.[5] The Laki eruption shot approximately 8 million tons of hydrogen fluoride and an estimated 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide gas into the skies, depositing stinking cloud cover all over Europe.[6] The sulfuric stench was one of the earliest and most unpleasant aspects on the continent. Plant and human health immediately declined, and frightened people rang church bells in efforts to reroute clouds.[7]

As Franklin sat about 1,300 miles southeast of Laki, and less than 10 miles east of Versailles, he watched the atypical clouds roll over metropolitan Parisian skies. This diplomat knew well that the summer of 1783 in northern France featured fits of extraordinary lightning, ground tremors, high winds, and torrential rains, as the hovering smoke blanketed the sky. French writers took to the Journal de Paris, the first major daily newspaper in France, to assure a frightened public that such unusual events did not signal that some larger natural disaster awaited. In some of these correspondences, Franklin gave advice on his early work on avoiding storm damages with lightning rods.[8] One such letter arrived in 1783 from a young attorney in Arras named Maximilien Robespierre, who complimented Franklin for serving human needs.[9] That year, Robespierre had used work by Franklin to defend a client against who local officials had forced to remove a lightning rod, partly on suspicion that discharging electricity into the ground might cause seismic activity, or even volcanoes.[10]

Franklin, who was one of the first to record a fairly accurate explanation for the calamities, also wrote to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester that, “During several of the summer months of the year 1783, when the effect of the sun’s rays to heat the earth in these norther regions should have been greatest, there existed a constant fog over all Europe, and great part of North America.” Then, the solar “effect of heating the Earth was exceedingly diminished. Hence the surface was early frozen. Hence the first snows remained on it unmelted. Hence the air was more chilled. Hence perhaps the winter of 1783-84 was more severe than any that had happened for many years.” And unlike some peers who disputed the cause, Franklin wondered “whether it was the vast quantity of smoke, long continuing to issue during the summer from … Iceland.” [11]

This portrays Jay, Adams, and Franklin within the larger unfinished painting by Benjamin West, “Paris/1783 Treaty of Peace,” after 1820, Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., RR-1965.0024 (original held at the Winterthur Museum).

Lakagígar Erupting

Iceland suffered severely. One of the toxic compounds sprayed, fluorine, quickly fell back onto the island as hydrofluoric acid. About half the horses and cattle, and perhaps seventy-five percent of sheep on the island, died.  Laki, one of the largest “effusive” volcanic eruptions in recent history, did not launch gas as high into the atmosphere as some more explosive volcanic eruptions (for instance, Tambora in 1815, with a higher measurable volcanic explosivity index). The prolonged release placed most gas into the troposphere, the lower atmosphere where more rain, clouds, and surface winds interact. Soon, these ominous clouds covered swaths of Europe. A crowd around Broué, France pulled a priest from bed to have him perform a rite of exorcism upon the looming cloud. French observer Robert de Lamanon in Laon, who was a botanist, wrote that the haze and fog were cold and humid, with clouds so thick that one could easily look at the sun with a telescope without a blackened lens, an event so extreme that even the oldest people in the area had never seen. In France, where debates raged about the cause of the crisis all summer, the excess mortality rate – or, deaths above the anticipated average – may have reach twenty-five percent of extra fatalities that year.[12]

Significant portions of the northern hemisphere cooled by a few degrees Fahrenheit, with some analysts attributing impacts on crops as far away as Japan, which also experienced widespread famine with other contributing conditions. Rain in the Nile watershed dropped by at least ten percent, leaving crops in some areas unplanted or unwatered. Within a year or more, perhaps fifteen percent of Egypt’s population had perished. One of the largest lava deposits ever recorded, the more than 3.5 cubic miles of lava that burst forth could today cover all Manhattan, from its streets to over the vast majority of its skyline.[13] And in Virginia in February 1784, as with severely cold temperatures across the United States, James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “We have had a severer season & particularly a greater quantity of snow than is remembered to have distinguished any preceding winter. The effect of it on the price of grain & other provisions is much dreaded.”[14]

Jón Steingrímsson, a minister who lived near the volcano in Iceland, recounted the events in his district, where over eighty percent of humans fled or died during the eruption. Nobody was well-prepared for the inundations of lava and ash, and disaster responses were miscalculated. Some neighbors showed their callousness and selfishness by hoarding supplies and refusing support to others.[15] Steingrímsson described that horses had lost all their flesh. Their skin began to die and fall off along their spines. He said that sheep suffered even more brutally, with severe swellings, especially at their jaws, and with protrusions through their skin. Toxic exposures left animals appearing as if they had been chewed to pieces.[16] In subsequent months and years, commercial control over Iceland by distant Denmark stifled recovery. Aid to abet suffering was minimal. When Icelanders entertained autonomy and even independence from Denmark only years afterward, political ideas from the revolution and republic of France, tectonic shifts yet to happen, influentially circulated northward into Iceland.[17]

After the erratic weather of the initial months, the colder temperatures and higher precipitation led to snow and ice pack that later melted with even more rain in early 1784. This caused massive flooding across Europe, some of the worst ever measured. In France, yet another destruction followed with outbreaks of disease from water intrusion and collection, which prompted governmental hygiene campaigns. King Louis XVI even donated about one percent of royal income for that year to disaster victims.[18]

“Isle d’Islande,” in Allain Manesson-Mallet, Description de l’univers, contenant les différents systêmes du monde, les cartes generales & particulieres de la géographie ancienne & moderne (Paris: Denys Thierry, 1683), 293, from the John Carter Brown Library Map Collection, 12408-041. Laki is east of “Mont-Hecla” (Hekla) which is depicted as erupting on this map. In his full letter to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, Benjamin Franklin misidentified Hekla as the source of the eruption.

Adams and Jay, the two other American signatories of the Treaty of Paris, also sat under the same disastrous cloud coverage, and months later corresponded about worsening conditions. Adams, updating Jay from near Paris in 1785, further described the “Serious Calamity” unfolding in France from the “extream Severity of cold and drouth which has continued.”  Observing the French populace, Adams wrote, “There is Such a Scarcity of Herbage and Pasturage, that the poor People in many Places have been obliged to kill their Cattle, to prevent them from starving. In many other Places, they have been necessitated to feed their Cattle with Grain and Bread and other Things necessary for the Support of their Families. The daily Processions which pass before my Door, in Prayers for Warmth and Rain, are afflicting to Humanity.”

The geopolitical tactician in Adams also saw this as an opportunity for American exports, noting the difficulty French and British merchants would have in supplying their remaining colonies in the Americas with grains, as “it is generally agreed that the Crops of Grass will be So diminished, that even if the Wheat should not fail they shall be obliged to apply so much of the latter to the subsistence of their Cattle, that they must import from Us.”[19] Into 1786, Adams continued advocating this strategy, writing, “It is the Opinion of the Foresighted that Grain will be in Demand in Europe next Summer,” with crops failing well into eastern Europe, as “seedtime was so wett, as to give a melancholly Prospect for the next Year.”[20]

The fledgling United States identified and took advantage of this food shortage, selling extensively to nearby colonies in the Americas to bolster incomes and impair imperial rivals, all despite official British impediments to hem in the new nation. American farmers and merchants attempted this, licitly and illicitly, especially in grains and flours. Export amounts approached pre-war levels in some cases, and at higher prices due to shortages. Statistics suggest that the newly independent United States took advantage of dislocations from the real volcano of 1783 onward, and from the revolutionary volcano of 1789 onward.[21]

This depicts the flooding of 1784 in France. “Vue de la Ville de Rouen et d’une partie du Port pendant l’inondation de MDCCLXXXIV,” 1800s, Bibliothèque municipale de Rouen, topo. g 3866.

Pyroclastic Flowing

In France, as across continental Europe, crop failures continued for years, just as Adams had predicted. Grain prices soared, hunger increased, and fiscal failings strained pay for government forces that might otherwise dispel public unrest. French funding of the American Revolution, their loss in the Seven Years’ War before that, and other continental complications, set debt repayments at 55% of all revenues for the state, and outgoing payments exceeded income by nearly one-third. The poor paid a disproportionate tax burden, and already by 1786 and 1787, governmental bankruptcy was a real possibility. And in this malaise, King Louis XVI faced a generational revenue crisis in which he convened the états généraux (Estates General) for the first time in 175 years.

Food fragility and fear from environmental and fiscal factors emotionally vexed the French population. Crises of the 1780s continued unrelentingly. Poverty soared, exacerbated by population growth. In some areas, rent increases had outpaced wage growth by three, four, or even five times. Debt increased to fill affordability gaps. Wanderers begging for help proliferated.[22] Whereas some French historians have understandably debated regional variations and the extent to which the volcano itself influenced unrest, the compounding harvest and weather problems, including hailstorms, spread real insecurity.[23] Another unusually cold winter arrived in 1787, which turned into an overly damp spring, followed by a summer drought, all perhaps exacerbated by El Niño weather patterns, and transpiring amid growing fiscal crisis and societal malaise in France. The 1788 harvest was, yet again, very bad. Laki began an ominous turn into years of instability, and specific meteorological attributions aside, people experienced a crescendo of calamity.[24] New economic studies affirm that areas harmed more by bad harvests in the late 1780s seemed to have fomented more and earlier peasant revolt when the revolution arrived.[25]

Of the crushing winters leading into 1789, Jefferson, who represented the U.S. in France after Franklin, commented on the French population. He wrote:

 “For while laboring under the want of money for even ordinary purposes, in a government which required a million of livres a day, and driven to the last ditch by the universal call for liberty, there came on a winter of such severe cold, as was without example in the memory of man, or in the written records of history. … All outdoor labor was suspended, and the poor, without the wages of labor, were, of course, without either bread or fuel. The government found its necessities aggravated by that of procuring immense quantities of firewood, and of keeping great fires at all the cross streets, around which the people gathered in crowds, to avoid perishing with cold.[26]

Thus, once again with widespread hunger by 1789, a major factor over preceding years of disaster fed the “Great Fear” of peasants who revolted against landholding aristocrats and initiated the end of the seigneurial system in the August Decrees, sweeping legislation passed by the new National Assembly to further reduce privileges of the ancien régime. For years before, even preceding the Laki eruption, rumors and conspiratorial thinking about plots and plans to starve the populace had abounded. France, the largest economy in Europe, though still predominantly agricultural, had seen questionable agrarian, price, and grain store interventions, with recent factors of volcanic disaster and erratic weather that exacerbated fears of a plot to starve the already hungry rural populations.[27]

Philippe Joseph Maillart, “Emigration des Princes, des Courtisans: Les Chateaux de Campagne brulés, Août 1789,” between 1795 and 1799, Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, G.27914.

Emotion Within Environment

In France, it is apropos that in literature and life events preceding both real volcanoes and revolutionary eruptions, generations of enlightened science and political experiment were, quite literally, fixated upon geophysical eruptions.[28] Effusive metaphorical language about volcanoes to describe rapid and massive revolutionary change has long enticed both those who lived through these events and historians sorting out their significances long thereafter.[29] And in the development and violent course of the French Revolution, the role of emotion – fear, anger, heatedness, fury, passion, and more – has taken on a volcanic debate of its own among scholars.[30]

With years of environmental disasters, erratic weather, crop failures, financial fear, and survival anxiety, a real volcano tied to revolutionary eruption. From 1783, frequent food insecurity, price problems, and precarities of daily life deeply influenced incendiary events, like the October 1789 bread riots and women’s march on Versailles, which effectively captured the royal family. Perhaps the more visceral, emotive, shared experiences were years of climactic disaster and basic survival struggles. Maybe French masses erupted as much for these reasons as salons, libelles, and le siècle des lumières (Enlightenment), or censorship, nation, and divine right rule by Bourbon monarchs. Post-facto postulations of philosophes from the académie, then as now, nevertheless contoured cooling lava fields of once-inconceivable, once-improbable post-eruption worlds.[31]

Three connected volcanoes indelibly changed the world in one lesson on contingencies of emotion and environment. And as one national government in France fell, another formed with a Constitutional Convention on the other side of the Atlantic. In January 1788, Fisher Ames, interlocutor of  Adams and skeptic of an empowered public, stated during Massachusetts’ constitutional ratification debates that, “The people when they lose their liberties are cheated out of them. They nourish factions in their bosoms, which will subsist so long as abusing their honest credulity shall be the means of acquiring power. A democracy is a volcano, which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption, and carry desolation in their way.”[32] By 1795, after the Reign of Terror altered the reputation of lightning rod litigator Robespierre, Abigail and John Adams corresponded about their acquaintances comparing the “French Revolution to a Volcano, which had not only overturned the Government of that Kingdom Ravaging & destroying every thing near to its crater but by the violence of its Eruption shaking all the Kingdoms around, and the Lava of which came near to Scorching even the United States of America.”[33] For John Adams and his new nation, their own political volcano, and even Laki, had been expedient only years before. However, the soon-to-be second U.S. president and friends began to see how unwieldy governing an eruption could be.

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Charlton W. Yingling is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Louisville. His books and articles cover revolutions and reactions, slavery and abolition, perceptions of risks, and interspecies history, especially animals’ roles in human societies. His publications, built from funded research in multiple languages in over two dozen archives in eight countries, span the sixteenth century through the twenty-first century across the Americas.

Marissa E. Yingling is an Associate Professor in the Kent School of Social Work and Family Science at the University of Louisville. She has authored or co-authored more than twenty-five peer reviewed articles. She co-edited the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Research Methods and Methodologies in Social and Behavioral Sciences. For twenty years she has worked on health care access for children with autism. She is also finishing projects on the social and environmental implications of human activities in space, perceptions of risks, and the human future.

Title Image: Tomáš Malík, “Iceland: Fagradalsfjall’s lava flow at night,” 2022 (free to use). https://www.pexels.com/photo/lava-flowing-from-crater-at-night-27245741/

Endnotes:

[1] John Adams to William Tudor, 5 April 1818, in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, vol. x, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 300.

[2] Sarah Knott, “Narrating the Age of Revolution,” William & Mary Quarterly 73, no. 1 (January 2016), 3-36; Katrin Kleeman, A Mist Connection: An Environmental History of the Laki Eruption of 1783 and Its Legacy (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2024).

[3] Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957); Richard Brandon Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

[4] Richard R. Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776 (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

[5] Daniel E. Vasey, “Population, Agriculture, and Famine: Iceland, 1784-1785,” Human Ecology 19, no. 3 (September 1991), 323-350; Alexandra Witzke and Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire (London: Profile, 2015), 20-30 and 140-145.

[6] Jelena Ćirić, “New Study Gives Insight into Effects of 1783 Laki Eruption,” Iceland Review (27 May 2019); Brian Zambri, Alan Robock, Michael J. Mills, and Anja Schmidt, “Modeling the 1783–1784 Laki Eruption in Iceland: 1. Aerosol Evolution and Global Stratospheric Circulation Impacts,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 124, no. 3 (2019), 6750-6769.

[7] Oliver Hochadel, “‘In nebula nebulorum’: The Dry Fog of the Summer of 1783 and the Introduction of Lightning Rods in the German Empire,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 99, no. 5 (2009), 45-70; Katrin Kleemann, “Active Volcanoes, Active Imaginations: Fire-Spitting Mountains and Subterraneous Roars in the German Territories in the Summer of 1783,” Global Environment 15, no. 3 (2022), 456-489. On sulfuric connotations, see Andrew Kettler, “Dispersing the Devil’s Stench: Shifting Perceptions of Sulfuric Miasma in Early Modern English Literatures,” Partial Answers 22, no. 1 (January 2024), 27-53.

[8] “Franklin’s Responses to the Maréchale de Beauvau’s Questions on Lightning Rods (after 21 July 1783),” in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 40, May 16 through September 15, 1783, ed. Ellen R. Cohn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 352–354. The Journal de Paris also covered the work of Franklin on lightning rods. See, Elizabeth Andrews, “Between Auteurs and Abonnés: Reading the Journal de Paris, 1787–1789,” Journal of the Western Society for French History 37 (2009).

[9] Maximilien Robespierre to Benjamin Franklin, Arras, 1 October 1783, in Œuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre, vol. iii, Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre (Paris: FÉLIX ALCAN, 1926), 29.

[10] Jessica Riskin, “The Lawyer and the Lightning Rod,” Science in Context 12, no. 1 (1999), 61-99.

[11] Benjamin Franklin, “Meteorological imaginations and conjectures,” May 1784, Passy, France, in Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, vol. II (Warrington: Eyres, 1785), 357-361.

[12] “The summer of acid rain,” The Economist (19 December 2007), 133-135; Roland Rabartin and Philippe Rocher, “Les Volcans, le climat et la Révolution Française,” Mémoire de l’Association Volcanologique Européenne (1993), 1-56; Thorvaldur Thordarson and Stephen Self, “Atmosphere and environmental effects of the 1783-1784 Laki eruption,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 108, no. D1 (2003), AAC 7-1-AAC 7-29; John Gratan, Roland Rabartin, Stephen Self, Thorvaldur Thordarson, “Volcanic air pollution and mortality in France, 1783-1784,” Comptes Rendus Geoscience (2005); Alwyn Scarth, Vulcan’s Fury (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 105-120; .  And, if such an eruption happened today, Europe would almost certainly see another spike in excess mortality. See, Anja Schmidt, Bart Ostro, Kenneth Carslaw, Marjorie Wilson, Thorvaldur Thordarson, Graham Mann, and Adrian Simmons, “Excess mortality in Europe following a future Laki-style Icelandic eruption,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 38 (20 September 2011), 15710-15715.

[13] Thordarson, “Atmosphere and environmental effects of the 1783-1784 Laki eruption”; “The summer of acid rain”; Geoffrey Hellman, “The Laki volcanic eruption of 1783-1784,” Ph.D. Diss., Université Rennes 2, 2021; John Grattan, Sabina Michnowicz, Roland Rabartin, “The long shadow: Understanding the influence of the Laki fissure eruption on human mortality in Europe,” Living Under the Shadow, eds. John Grattan and Robin Torrence (London: Taylor & Francis, 2016), 153-174.

[14] James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 11 February 1784, in Papers of James Madison, vol. 7, 3 May 1783-20 February 1784, eds. William Hutchinson and William Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 418-420; Edward Bennett Garriott, Cold Waves and Frost in the United States (Washington: Weather Bureau, 1906), 10.

[15] Jón Steingrímsson, Fires of the Earth: The Laki Eruption, 1783-1784 (Reykjavík: Nordic Volcanological Institute: University of Iceland Press, 1998), 38-41, 62-62, and 80-81.

[16] Steingrímsson, Fires of the Earth, 74-76.

[17] Anna Agnarsdóttir, “Iceland in the Eighteenth Century: An Island Outpost of Europe?,” 1700-Tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 10 (2013), 11-38; Gunnar Karlsson, The History of Iceland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 177-181 and 195-199; Margrét Gunnarsdóttir, “Emerging Civil Society in Iceland Enlightenment Ideas and Old Norse Heritage,” in Cooperation and Confrontation in Nordic Civil Societies since 1800, eds. Sunniva Engh, Ruth Hemstad, and Mads Mordhorst (London: Routledge, 2024), 79-99; Guðmundur Hálfdánarson, “Social distinctions and national unity: On politics of nationalism in nineteenth-century Iceland,” History of European Ideas 21 (1995), 763-779; Baldur Thorhallsson and Tómas Joensen, “Iceland’s External Affairs from the Napoleonic Era to the Occupation of Denmark: Danish and British Shelter,” Stjórnmál & stjórnsýsla 11, no. 2 (2015).

[18] Rudolf Brázdil, Gaston Demarée, Mathias Deutsch, Emmanuel Garnier, Andrea Kiss, Jürg Luterbacher, Neil Macdonald, Christian Rohr, Petr Dobrovolný, Petr Kolář, and Kateřina Chromá, “European floods during the winter 1783/1784: scenarios of an extreme event during the ‘Little Ice Age’,” Theoretical and Applied Climatology 100, no. 1 (March 2009), 163-189. See also, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine et comparée du climat, Tome 2 (Paris: Fayard, 2006); Gaston Demarée and A.E.J. Ogilvie, “Bons Baisers d’Islande: Climatic, Environmental, and Human Dimensions Impacts of the Lakagígar Eruption (1783–1784) in Iceland,” in History and Climate, eds. P.D. Jones, A.E.J. Ogilvie, T.D. Davies, and K.R. Biffra (Boston: Springer, 2001), 219-246. See also, Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age (New York: Basic Books, 2019); Adam Bobbette, The Pulse of the Earth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023).

[19] John Adams to John Jay, 7 May 1785, Auteuil, France, in Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 17, April–November 1785, eds. Gregg Lint, James Taylor, Sara Georgini, Hobson Woodward, Sara Sikes, Amanda Mathews, and Sara Martin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 97–99.

[20] John Adams to Rufus King, 14 February 1786, Grosvenor Square, in Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 18, December 1785–January 1787, eds. Gregg Lint, Sara Martin, James Taylor, Sara Georgini, Hobson Woodward, Sara Sikes, Amanda Norton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 158-160.

[21] Geoffrey Gilbert, “Baltimore’s Flour Trade to the Caribbean, 1750-1815,” Journal of Economic History 37, no. 1 (March 1977), 249-251; Patrick Callaway, “American Independence as a Supply Chain Crisis: The Case of Nova Scotia 1783-94,” Age of Revolutions (February 2026); G. Terry Sharrer, “The Merchant-Millers: Baltimore’s Flour Milling Industry, 1783-1860,” Agricultural History 56, no. 1 (January 1982), 138-150; Brooke Hunter, “The Prospect of Independent Americans: The Grain Trade and Economic Development during the 1780s,” Explorations in Early American Culture 5 (2001), 260-287; Gordon Bjork, “The Weaning of the American Economy: Independence, Market Changes, and Economic Development,” Journal of Economic History 24, no. 4 (December 1964), 541-560.

[22] Maria Waldinger, ““Let Them Eat Cake”: Drought, Peasant Uprisings, and Demand for Institutional Change in the French Revolution,” Journal of Economic Growth 29 (2024), 41-77; David Andress, The French Revolution and the People (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 26-28, 57-59, and 79-81.

[23] See earlier ideas by French meteorologist and geologist, Rabartin and Rocher, in “Les Volcans”; Emmanuel Garnier, “Les brouillards du Laki en 1783,” Bulletin de l’Académie nationale de médecine 195, nos. 4–5 (April 2011), 1043-1055; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine et comparée du Climat. vol. ii, Disettes et révolutions (Paris: Fayard, 2006).

[24] William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 6; Richard H. Grove, “Global impact of the 1789-93 El Niño,” Nature 393(1998), 318-319; John Richards, Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 82-84.

[25] Waldinger, ““Let Them Eat Cake.”

[26] Thomas Jefferson in Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Random House, 1944), 91-92.

[27] Georges Lefebvre, La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1932); David Andress, French Society in Revolution, 1789-1799 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

[28] David McCallam, “Exploring Volcanoes in the Late French Enlightenment,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (2006), 47-59.

[29] For more revolutionary volcano and ash context, see, Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 139-163; Charlton W. Yingling, Siblings of Soil: Dominicans and Haitians in the Age of Revolutions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022), 41-48; Sanja Perovic, “Death by Volcano,” French Studies 67, no. 1 (2013); Alfred Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1988).

[30] Sophie Wahnich, La liberté et la mort (Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2003), 33-36; Sophia Rosenfeld, “Thinking about Feeling, 1789-1799,” French Historical Studies 32, no. 4 (Fall 2009), 697-706.

[31] Olwen Hufton, “Women in Revolution, 1789-1796,” Past & Present 53 (November 1971), 90-108; David Garrioch, “The Everyday Lives of Parisian Women and the October Days of 1789,” Social History 24, no. 3 (October 1999), 231-249; George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

[32] Fisher Ames to Massachusetts Ratification Convention,15 January 1788, in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution Digital Edition, eds., John Kaminski, Gaspare Saladino, Richard Leffler, Charles Schoenleberand, Margaret Hogan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).

[33] Abigail Adams to John Adams, 21 February 1795, in Adams Family Correspondence, vol. x, January 1794-June 1795, eds. Margaret Hogan, James Taylor, Sara Martin, Hobson Woodward, Sara Sikes, Gregg Lint, and Sara Georgini (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 399-400.