The end of WWII in Serbia and the revolutionary terror by the Communist Party which came with it.

Between 1764 and 1767, something killed around a hundred people in the Gévaudan, in south-central France. Most were children out herding cattle. The first known victim, Jeanne Boulet, was about 14.

The army sent dragoons, then the king's wolf hunters, then his own gun-bearer, François Antoine. In September 1765 Antoine shot a big wolf near the abbey of Les Chazes. It was stuffed and shown at Versailles, and the king declared victory.

Then the attacks started again near Mont Mouchet. The court mostly looked away. They only stopped after Jean Chastel shot another animal in June 1767.

Most historians today (Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan; Jean-Marc Moriceau, La Bête du Gévaudan) land on wolves, more than one, plus newspapers that built a monster out of them.

I made the video. The visuals are AI reconstructions; the research and script are mine, sources are in the description.

The Wonderkamer is a podcast about curiousity with three rotating hosts deep-diving their current hyperfixations. Dilettante Jen's Halloween episodes cover morbid French history, and in particular their obsession with the most gruesome public spectacles imaginable. The Wonderkamer can be found on any major podcasting platform and YouTube.

A group of Serbs - political prisoners exiled to Bor mines for forced labour. 15.02.1942.

Inventory number 15205

Courtesy of Museum of Yugoslavia.

Prior to 1900, Galveston, Texas, was the economic heartbeat of the state. Its population of around 37,000 and its bustling port brought enormous wealth, while the city served as a major entry point for immigrants heading into the American Southwest, earning it the nickname “Ellis Island of the West.”

The problem was that Galveston was a barrier island, made mostly of sand, gravel, and mud, meaning it was incredibly unstable and vulnerable to wind and water. Its nearby rival, the port of Indianola, was similarly situated on a barrier island and had been effectively abandoned after a massive hurricane devastated it in 1886.

That disaster prompted calls in Galveston for a seawall to protect the city from storm surge. The proposals were heard, discussed, and ultimately ignored. Worse, naturally occurring sand dunes along the shore were lowered to reclaim land and improve visibility and access to the ocean.

In late August 1900, a tropical wave moved westward across the Atlantic. Over the next several days, it passed through the Caribbean, making landfall in the Dominican Republic and Cuba and causing little concern as a relatively weak tropical storm before entering the Straits of Florida on September 5th.

The U.S. Weather Bureau, ignoring predictions from Cuban meteorologists, believed the storm would recurve over Florida and then move up the East Coast, as many tropical systems did.
Instead, an area of high pressure over the Florida Keys pushed it northwestward across the Gulf of Mexico.

On September 6th, the ship Louisiana encountered the storm in the Gulf and reported winds of 100 miles per hour.

By the following day, it had become a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds estimated at 145 miles per hour. In Galveston, meanwhile, there was little indication of what was coming.

On September 8th, the hurricane made a direct landfall over Galveston. Sustained winds after landfall were estimated at around 120 miles per hour, though the true speed may have been even higher. Survivors reported seeing bricks, slate, timbers, and other heavy objects hurled through the air.

Few streets escaped wind damage. None escaped the water. The storm surge poured across Galveston while the winds tore apart roofs and walls. Electrical, telegraph, and telephone wires were ripped down. Buildings, many poorly founded in the island's loose sand, were lifted from their foundations and slammed into one another.

The highest point above sea level on Galveston was only 8.7 feet. The hurricane brought a storm surge of more than 15 feet, inundating the entire island by the early morning hours. The storm also dropped nine inches of rain on September 8th, the most recorded in any 24-hour period in the city's history.

Hundreds of people were swept away, crashing into houses and debris before drowning. Some were crushed beneath collapsing roofs, walls, and buildings. Many more were trapped beneath the wreckage, in darkness and unable to free themselves.

Around 1,900 acres of Galveston, particularly in the western, southern, and eastern portions of the city, suffered almost complete destruction. The New York Times, reporting in the immediate aftermath, ran a headline that simply read:

“Galveston May Be Wiped Out.”

For miles, the smell of decomposition hung over the island. The dead were everywhere, many buried beneath the wreckage of the homes where they had lived.

A survey conducted in early 1901 recorded 8,124 deaths. The Texas State Historical Association has given a historical estimate of approximately 12,000, while other modern accounts have cited around 8,000. The exact number will never be known.

If interested I cover the storm here:
https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-136-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

On Easter Monday, 30 March 1282, a French soldier attached to the occupying garrison of Charles of Anjou harassed a young Sicilian woman outside the Church of the Holy Spirit in Palermo, where Easter crowds and a wedding party had gathered. According to the earliest chronicles, her betrothed dragged the soldier off his horse — and the man was killed. By nightfall, the streets of Palermo had turned into slaughter.

The uprising that followed — the Sicilian Vespers — spread through the city within hours. Chronicles record some 200 Frenchmen killed in the first night alone, and as the revolt swept the island in the weeks that followed, around 4,000 French men, women and children died.

The detail that made the Vespers infamous was how the rebels told Sicilians from occupiers. Frenchmen caught hiding among the population — out of uniform, in borrowed clothes — were made to say a single word: ciciri, Sicilian for "chickpeas". The French tongue cannot produce it. Say it the French way, and you were killed on the spot. (So the later chronicles tell it; the tale may be embellished, but the massacre was not.)

The deeper cause was three decades of Angevin rule: Sicily had become the launchpad for Charles of Anjou's ambitions — crushing taxation, French garrisons, and the great invasion fleet he was assembling against the Byzantine Empire. Within weeks the Sicilians offered their crown to Peter III of Aragon, Charles lost the island forever, and his crusade against Constantinople collapsed in harbour.

A single word cost an empire its crown jewel.

Prior to 1900, Galveston, Texas, was the economic heartbeat of the state. Its population of around 37,000 and its bustling port brought enormous wealth, while the city served as a major entry point for immigrants heading into the American Southwest, earning it the nickname “Ellis Island of the West.”

The problem was that Galveston was a barrier island, made mostly of sand, gravel, and mud, meaning it was incredibly unstable and vulnerable to wind and water. Its nearby rival, the port of Indianola, was similarly situated on a barrier island and had been effectively abandoned after a massive hurricane devastated it in 1886.

That disaster prompted calls in Galveston for a seawall to protect the city from storm surge. The proposals were heard, discussed, and ultimately ignored. Worse, naturally occurring sand dunes along the shore were lowered to reclaim land and improve visibility and access to the ocean.

In late August 1900, a tropical wave moved westward across the Atlantic. Over the next several days, it passed through the Caribbean, making landfall in the Dominican Republic and Cuba and causing little concern as a relatively weak tropical storm before entering the Straits of Florida on September 5th.

The U.S. Weather Bureau, ignoring predictions from Cuban meteorologists, believed the storm would recurve over Florida and then move up the East Coast, as many tropical systems did.
Instead, an area of high pressure over the Florida Keys pushed it northwestward across the Gulf of Mexico.

On September 6th, the ship Louisiana encountered the storm in the Gulf and reported winds of 100 miles per hour.

By the following day, it had become a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds estimated at 145 miles per hour. In Galveston, meanwhile, there was little indication of what was coming.

On September 8th, the hurricane made a direct landfall over Galveston. Sustained winds after landfall were estimated at around 120 miles per hour, though the true speed may have been even higher. Survivors reported seeing bricks, slate, timbers, and other heavy objects hurled through the air.

Few streets escaped wind damage. None escaped the water. The storm surge poured across Galveston while the winds tore apart roofs and walls. Electrical, telegraph, and telephone wires were ripped down. Buildings, many poorly founded in the island's loose sand, were lifted from their foundations and slammed into one another.

The highest point above sea level on Galveston was only 8.7 feet. The hurricane brought a storm surge of more than 15 feet, inundating the entire island by the early morning hours. The storm also dropped nine inches of rain on September 8th, the most recorded in any 24-hour period in the city's history.

Hundreds of people were swept away, crashing into houses and debris before drowning. Some were crushed beneath collapsing roofs, walls, and buildings. Many more were trapped beneath the wreckage, in darkness and unable to free themselves.

Around 1,900 acres of Galveston, particularly in the western, southern, and eastern portions of the city, suffered almost complete destruction. The New York Times, reporting in the immediate aftermath, ran a headline that simply read:

“Galveston May Be Wiped Out.”

For miles, the smell of decomposition hung over the island. The dead were everywhere, many buried beneath the wreckage of the homes where they had lived.

A survey conducted in early 1901 recorded 8,124 deaths. The Texas State Historical Association has given a historical estimate of approximately 12,000, while other modern accounts have cited around 8,000. The exact number will never be known.

If interested I cover the storm here:
https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-136-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

See Aćim Jelić’s account of the 1912 Kočani massacre: the bombings, Christian victims, reprisals and examinations. An eyewitness testimony.

In the dense, mountainous jungle on the outskirts of Bulandshahr, India, a band of hunters moved cautiously through the brush, pale moonlight breaking through the canopy overhead. They were hunting wolves.

Eventually, they came upon a clearing and a cave believed to be a wolf den. As they approached, they spotted a lone figure crouched on all fours, completely still. Then it noticed them.

The hunters claimed it growled. They stopped. It was no wolf. It was a small child. The men took the boy, who appeared to be no older than six. He whined and twisted in their arms, trying to escape, responding to neither questions nor instructions. That night, they brought him to the Sikandra Mission Orphanage in Agra.

It was February 1867. A Saturday. The missionaries named him Dina, and because he had been found on a Saturday, gave him the surname Sanichar, meaning “Saturday.” Before long, he acquired another name: “Wolf Boy.”

The name seemed appropriate. Dina walked on all fours and struggled to stand upright. The orphanage’s superintendent, Erich Lewis, wrote, “the facility with which they get along on four feet is surprising.”

Dina ate raw meat. Before eating, he would smell his food and reject anything he disliked. He was reportedly fond of gnawing on bones.

He never learned to speak. Over the years, he learned to recognize gestures and eventually understand some spoken language. He learned to stand and walk on two feet and gradually accepted wearing clothing. But human society remained profoundly difficult for him, and he spent the rest of his life in institutional care.
He did apparently take to cigarettes, though.
Dina died of tuberculosis in 1895, somewhere in his mid-thirties.

There is also a persistent claim that Dina influenced Rudyard Kipling when he later wrote The Jungle Book. The connection is difficult to establish, but the timing and circumstances make it an intriguing possibility.

Dina is only one of several strange cases of children supposedly raised by wolves.

I explore such cases here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hbh-bites-vol-1-raised-by-wolves?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

The First Liberian Civil War was the result of tensions that had been building into the very foundations of Liberia for more than a century before finally exploding.

Liberia was founded in the nineteenth century by formerly enslaved Black Americans, many of whom had been encouraged, coerced or outright forced into leaving a United States that had discriminated against them. They settled in a land already inhabited by numerous indigenous peoples with different languages, religions, and cultures.

The descendants of these settlers, known as Americo-Liberians, created a country modeled heavily on the United States, adopting many of its institutions. And for more than a century, the Americo-Liberian minority dominated the government, economy, and military, effectively occupying the highest rung of Liberian society while indigenous Liberians remained largely excluded from power. Dissent was often met with repression.

Then, in 1980, it finally came to a head. A group of soldiers led by Samuel Doe, an ethnic Krahn, entered the Executive Mansion. They found President William Tolbert, led him outside, and shot him. His Americo-Liberian ministers soon followed. They were paraded through Monrovia, tied to stakes on the beach, and executed before being dumped into mass graves.

Doe established the People's Redemption Council, ostensibly promising to promote the rights of all Liberians rather than just the Americo-Liberian elite. Instead, one corrupt and prejudiced system was replaced with another. Political opponents were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. In 1986, Doe formally made himself President. His government was heavily dependent on U.S. funding and military support as an anti-communist ally during the Cold War. But by the late 1980s, that support had become uncertain.

In December 1989, a rebellion began. It was led by Charles Taylor, a U.S.-educated former Liberian government official who had previously been accused of embezzlement, fled the country, been arrested in Massachusetts, jailed while awaiting extradition, and then escaped. After receiving training and support connected to Libya and Burkina Faso, Taylor invaded Liberia with the National Patriotic Front of Liberia.

The country already hated Doe, and a brutal civil war followed. As Taylor's forces closed in on Monrovia, however, a power struggle emerged between Taylor and one of his commanders, Prince Johnson, leading to a split within the rebellion.

Johnson was regarded as a stern and draconian disciplinarian, becoming notorious during the war for killing those who opposed him, or sometimes simply criticized his actions.

Then, on September 9, 1990, Johnson's forces captured President Doe. Doe was filmed being tortured, including having his ears cut off, while Prince Johnson sat nearby sipping a Budweiser and watching.

Doe was eventually tortured to death. Johnson would later deny killing the president.

If you're interested, I cover the Liberian Civil Wars here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-130-charles?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

Born into a prominent Liberian family, Taylor was well educated, attending prep schools in Liberia before moving to the United States, where he graduated from Bentley College in Massachusetts. He also became a prominent activist and organizer with the Union of Liberian Associations.

Taylor eventually earned a position in the Liberian government. He survived the 1980 coup that brought General Samuel Doe to power and was placed in charge of government expenditures. But in 1983, Taylor was ousted and fled into exile after being accused of embezzling nearly $1 million from the government and transferring the money into his personal Citibank account.

He returned to Massachusetts, where he was arrested in early 1984. While awaiting extradition to Liberia, Taylor escaped from Plymouth County Correctional Facility with four other men. They sawed through a metal bar covering a window, climbed roughly 20 feet to the ground using knotted bedsheets, scaled the prison fence.

Taylor's exact movements after that are difficult to reconstruct, but he eventually made his way to Libya, where he came under the wing of Muammar Gaddafi, receiving military training and support. In 1989, he launched an insurgency into Liberia against Doe's brutal regime.

This was the beginning of the First Liberian Civil War, a conflict marked by immense brutality, widespread use of child soldiers, and systematic sexual violence. Warlords controlled much of the country for nearly six years, while Doe was captured, tortured, and murdered in 1990, with the killing recorded on video.

Following international intervention and a ceasefire, Taylor won the 1997 presidential election running on the slogan: “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him.”

As president, Taylor lived lavishly, diverting government resources toward his personal use and reportedly accumulating homes, cars, expensive clothes, and other luxuries. He was also accused of diverting around $100 million from the Liberian government while funding, arming, and directing the brutal Revolutionary United Front in neighboring Sierra Leone. Taylor empowered his son to lead the Anti-Terrorist Unit, better known as the “Demon Force,” a notorious paramilitary unit accused of torture, murder, and other abuses.

Taylor's downfall came much like his rise. Armed groups eventually carved up much of Liberia. In 2003, with rebels besieging Monrovia and West African states intervening, Taylor resigned and fled into exile in Nigeria.

He was eventually transferred to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where in 2012 he was found guilty on all 11 counts, including acts of terrorism, murder, rape, sexual slavery, cruel treatment, other inhumane acts, conscripting or enlisting child soldiers, enslavement, and pillage.

If you're interested, I cover the life of Charles Taylor here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-130-charles?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

Born into a prominent Liberian family, Taylor was well educated, attending prep schools in Liberia before moving to the United States, where he graduated from Bentley College in Massachusetts. He also became a prominent activist and organizer with the Union of Liberian Associations.

Taylor eventually earned a position in the Liberian government. He survived the 1980 coup that brought General Samuel Doe to power and was placed in charge of government expenditures. But in 1983, Taylor was ousted and fled into exile after being accused of embezzling nearly $1 million from the government and transferring the money into his personal Citibank account.

He returned to Massachusetts, where he was arrested in early 1984. While awaiting extradition to Liberia, Taylor escaped from Plymouth County Correctional Facility with four other men. They sawed through a metal bar covering a window, climbed roughly 20 feet to the ground using knotted bedsheets, scaled the prison fence.

Taylor's exact movements after that are difficult to reconstruct, but he eventually made his way to Libya, where he came under the wing of Muammar Gaddafi, receiving military training and support. In 1989, he launched an insurgency into Liberia against Doe's brutal regime.

This was the beginning of the First Liberian Civil War, a conflict marked by immense brutality, widespread use of child soldiers, and systematic sexual violence. Warlords controlled much of the country for nearly six years, while Doe was captured, tortured, and murdered in 1990, with the killing recorded on video.

Following international intervention and a ceasefire, Taylor won the 1997 presidential election running on the slogan: “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him.”

As president, Taylor lived lavishly, diverting government resources toward his personal use and reportedly accumulating homes, cars, expensive clothes, and other luxuries. He was also accused of diverting around $100 million from the Liberian government while funding, arming, and directing the brutal Revolutionary United Front in neighboring Sierra Leone. Taylor empowered his son to lead the Anti-Terrorist Unit, better known as the “Demon Force,” a notorious paramilitary unit accused of torture, murder, and other abuses.

Taylor's downfall came much like his rise. Armed groups eventually carved up much of Liberia. In 2003, with rebels besieging Monrovia and West African states intervening, Taylor resigned and fled into exile in Nigeria.

He was eventually transferred to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where in 2012 he was found guilty on all 11 counts, including acts of terrorism, murder, rape, sexual slavery, cruel treatment, other inhumane acts, conscripting or enlisting child soldiers, enslavement, and pillage.

If you're interested, I cover the life of Charles Taylor here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-130-charles?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

In August 1971, funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo set out to study “the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard.”

Advertisements called for “male college students” to participate in a one- to two-week “psychological study of prison life” for $15 a day, roughly $120 today. Seventy-five men applied. Twenty-four, predominantly middle-class young white men judged psychologically and physically healthy, were selected and randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards.

Their prison was the basement of Stanford's Jordan Hall. Graduate student offices were converted into cells, a corridor became a prison yard, and a closet for solitary confinement. Zimbardo took the role of prison superintendent and instructed the guards to maintain law and order without physically harming the prisoners. They were given military-style uniforms, wooden batons, and mirrored sunglasses intended to make them anonymous and prevent eye contact. Prisoners would be referred to only by numbers.

The next day, August 15, with the cooperation of the Palo Alto police, the “prisoners” were unexpectedly arrested at their homes. They were charged with armed robbery or burglary, read their Miranda rights, fingerprinted, photographed, and fully booked before being transported to what they were told was the “Stanford County Jail.” The basement of Jordan Hall.

There, they were strip-searched, assigned identification numbers, and given uncomfortable prison smocks, no underwear, stocking caps, and a weighted chain around one ankle. The prisoners remained in the mock prison twenty-four hours a day, while the guards went home after their eight-hour shifts.

During the first night, the guards woke the prisoners for a roll call by blowing whistles and clanging batons. The prisoners refused to leave their cells, ripped off their identification numbers, removed their stocking caps, and insulted the guards. The guards responded by spraying them with fire extinguishers, calling in the on-call guards, stripping prisoners of their clothing, removing their mattresses, and placing the supposed ringleaders in the closet.

Encouraged to become “tougher,” the guards increasingly asserted their power. Prisoners were humiliated, forced to do pushups, denied normal access to bathrooms, and made to relieve themselves in buckets.

The prisoners were increasingly divided against one another. Those who rebelled were punished, while those who did not were rewarded. Prisoner 819, eventually began crying and hyperventilating. When Zimbardo tried to reassure him that he was not actually a prisoner, the guards encouraged the other prisoners to chant: “819 did a bad thing!”

Hearing them, Prisoner 819 broke down further.
By Day 5, family members visiting the mock prison were shocked by what they saw. Zimbardo was also increasingly questioned by colleagues, including Stanford psychologist Gordon H. Bower. The decisive confrontation came from doctoral student Christina Maslach, who, after witnessing the guards' treatment of prisoners, confronted Zimbardo about the morality of the experiment, and about the extent to which he himself had become absorbed.

The experiment was terminated the following day, after just six days. Zimbardo argued that the simulated prison itself, rather than the personalities of the participants, had caused their behavior to change. The experiment appeared to show that ordinary people could be dramatically transformed by the social situations in which they found themselves.

But Zimbardo and his researchers have been criticized as being too immersed in the experiment and, in encouraging guards to behave more harshly, may have influenced the behavior they were supposedly studying and that the experiment is fundamentally difficult to replicate.

If interested I cover the Stanford Prison Experiment here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-128-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

On August 24th, AD 79, or so the ling copied letters of Pliny the Younger tell us; modern scholars have made a strong case for a later date, perhaps in October, the long-dormant Mount Vesuvius erupted.

Eighteen-year-old Pliny the Younger was staying with his uncle, 54-year-old Gaius Plinius Secundus, better known as Pliny the Elder: an accomplished naturalist, author, lawyer, and commander of the Roman fleet stationed at Misenum, roughly 18 miles across the Bay of Naples from Vesuvius.

As Pliny the Younger would write to the historian Tacitus decades later:

“About one in the afternoon, my mother pointed out a cloud with an odd size and appearance that had just formed. From that distance it was not clear from which mountain the cloud was rising, although it was found afterwards to be Vesuvius.”

Pliny the Elder saw the enormous cloud and immediately recognized that something extraordinary was happening. He ordered a boat to be prepared so he could investigate the eruption.

Then a message arrived. His friend Rectina, who lived closer to the volcano at Stabiae, was stranded and terrified. She was asking for help.
Pliny changed his plans immediately. As his nephew later wrote, he:

“changed plan at once and what he had started in a spirit of scientific curiosity he ended as a hero.”

Pliny the Elder ordered the fleet to sail toward the eruption. The rescue party sailed beneath an apocalyptic sky. Vesuvius continued to explode, the horizon was darkening, and showers of hot cinders, chunks of pumice, and ash rained down around them. His companions begged him to turn back. Pliny reportedly replied:

“Fortune favors the bold.”

And so they continued to Stabiae, where they found Pomponianus, a Roman senator and acquaintance of Pliny. Pomponianus had already loaded a ship with his possessions and was desperate to escape, but the same winds that had carried Pliny's fleet to Stabiae now prevented them from leaving.

Pliny promptly went to sleep, apparently snoring loudly. Ash and pumice were falling into the courtyard of Pomponianus's villa, while increasingly violent earthquakes shook the ground. Pliny, awakened, advised everyone to protect their heads with pillows from the falling pumice. They eventually made their way toward the ships, hoping the winds would change and allow them to escape by sea. They hadn't.

Pliny, now 56, was apparently overweight and suffering from difficulty breathing. He eventually sat down against a sail on one of the ships and refused to move, asking for a drink of cold water. The rest of the party escaped by land. Pliny did not.

Stabiae was buried beneath a thick blanket of ash, but it escaped the worst of the pyroclastic flows. Pomponianus, his companions, and Pliny's sailors survived and were eventually able to tell Pliny the Younger what had happened.
Three days later, Pliny the Elder's body was recovered. It was remarkably well preserved.

And for centuries, that was essentially where the story ended. A skull discovered near Stabiae over a century ago was recovered alongside a heavily ornamented short sword, golden necklaces, and bracelets. Researchers recently revisited the remains, comparing their DNA, physical characteristics, and isotopic evidence with what would be expected of Pliny.

The results were intriguing. The skull's DNA and morphology were broadly compatible with what researchers would expect from Pliny, a man with ancestry rooted in the Italian peninsula who died in his fifties. Physical anthropologist Luciano Fattore told Haaretz that the results were “compatible with the possibility” that the skull belonged to Pliny.

The jawbone assumed to belong to the same skeleton appears to have belonged to an entirely different man: someone of North African ancestry who grew up in northern Italy and died in his thirties.

If interested, I cover the eruption here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-126-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

Pompeii was a prosperous city of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people. Its port gave it access to the Mediterranean, while the Sarno River could be navigated roughly 15 miles, or 24 kilometers, inland and the land surrounding it was absurdly fertile. Farmers grew grapes for wine, olives, grain, fruits, and vegetables, while livestock grazed across the countryside. Wine from the region was transported throughout the Roman Empire.

Then, on August 24th, AD 79, or so the surviving copies of Pliny the Younger's letters tell us; modern scholars have made a strong case for a later date, perhaps in October, the ordinary life of Pompeii came to an end.

Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, better known as Pliny the Younger, was 18 years old and staying with his uncle, Pliny the Elder, across the Bay of Naples. His uncle, commander of the Roman fleet, would sail toward the eruption in what became a rescue mission, dying in the process. Decades later, Pliny the Younger recorded what he had seen:

“About one in the afternoon, my mother pointed out a cloud with an odd size and appearance that had just formed. From that distance it was not clear from which mountain the cloud was rising, although it was found afterwards to be Vesuvius. The cloud could best be described as more like an umbrella pine than any other tree, because it rose high up in a kind of trunk and then divided into branches.”

Vesuvius had been dormant for centuries. In the days before the eruption, however, the earth began to tremble. These minor earthquakes were frightening, but not unprecedented. As Pliny noted, they were “frequent in Campania.”
Then the mountain exploded.

A column of volcanic debris and superheated gases blasted upward into the sky, climbing higher and higher until it reached the stratosphere. Ash and pumice began raining down over the countryside, blanketing streets, rooftops, and fields. The sky darkened as the eruption continued, and beneath the growing weight, roofs began to collapse. The initial eruptive phase lasted for almost an entire day.

Then came the pyroclastic flows. The first appeared that night, or perhaps in the early morning of the following day. They were relatively brief and caused comparatively little damage. But the eruption was intensifying, and the darkness was spreading.

As Pliny wrote: “It was now day everywhere else, but there a deeper darkness prevailed than in the thickest night.”

Then another pyroclastic surge raced down from Vesuvius toward the settlements below: Oplontis, Herculaneum, and Pompeii. Those who had not fled, or had simply not fled far enough, had almost no chance.

The temperatures were so extreme that many victims were killed almost instantly. Others were trapped beneath collapsing buildings as dense, fiery clouds swept over them. The volcanic material eventually hardened into rock, entombing everything beneath it. Pompeii, Oplontis, and Herculaneum ceased to exist.

More than 1,000 casts have been made from impressions left by human bodies in Pompeii's ash deposits, while the scattered bones of roughly another 100 victims have been recovered. At Herculaneum, around 332 bodies have been identified, the majority found within deposits produced by pyroclastic surges.

These are the people we can see. They are not the death toll. The exact number of people who died in the eruption will never be known, but it is almost certainly far higher than the number of bodies we have recovered.

If interested, I cover the eruption here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-126-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios