Free Republic

This is the story of a largely forgotten disaster that struck medieval Britain between 1315 and 1319. Overshadowed by the Black Death just a generation later, it rarely gets the attention it deserves. 1315 was an extraordinarily bad year. The real problem was… things just kept getting worse. The Disaster BEFORE the Black Death | 10:34 Paul Whitewick | 267K subscribers | 12,109 views | September 13, 2026

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqFBa9ePWpo

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons. Scientific evidence – including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one...

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Outside the walls of Kiev's stunning Mikhailov cathedral and monastery, history is being revisited through an exhibition of large black-and-white photographs. They show dead animals and corpses rotting in the fields and people, barely able to stand, dressed in ragged clothes. The pictures are from 1932-1933. In Ukraine's collective memory, those years are known as the "Great Famine" when the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin forced Ukrainian peasants to give up their land and join collectivized farms by confiscating all food. Anyone caught saving food or taking even a grain of corn was sent to Siberia or shot. Historians estimate...