1. Strange colours in the sky

2. Changes of the seasons

3. Expanding the influence

4. The last role

5. The last night

6. Waves in the air

7. Influence of magic forces

8. For war and peace

A. In rural Irish communities of the early 1800s, weather forecasting was anything but a precise science. There were people who predicted and explained turns in the weather through the prism of superstition. One particular storm in 1839 was so peculiar that rural folk in the west of Ireland, stunned by its ferocity, feared it could be the end of the world. Some blamed it on the “fairies” from local tales.

B. The eruption of the volcano at Krakatoa in the Pacific Ocean was a major disaster by any measure. In 1883, the entire island of Krakatoa was simply blown apart, and the resulting tsunami killed tens of thousands of people on other islands. The volcanic dust thrown into the atmosphere affected the weather around the world, and people as far away as Britain and the United States saw red sunsets caused by particles in the atmosphere.

C. The dust from Mount Tambora, which had erupted in early April 1815 in the Indian Ocean, shrouded the globe. And with sunlight blocked, 1816 did not have a normal summer. The weather in Europe and North America took a bizarre turn that resulted in crop failures and even famine. Spring came but then everything seemed to turn backward, as cold temperatures returned.

D. Wireless telegraphy originated as a term to describe electrical signaling without the electric wires to connect the end points. It was different from the conventional electric telegraph signaling. The term was initially applied to a variety of competing technologies to communicate messages encoded as symbols, without wires, around the turn of the 20th century, but radio emerged as the most significant.

E. By the time Abraham Lincoln became president, the telegraph had become an accepted part of American life. Lincoln's first State of the Union message was transmitted over the telegraph wires in 1861. During the Civil War, Lincoln spent many hours in the telegraph room of the War Department building near the White House. The president would generally write his messages in longhand, and telegraph operators would relay them, in military cipher, to the front.

F. One of the truly tragic events in American history is the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Just as the Civil War was coming to an end, on April 14, 1865, the president had sought a night of relaxation at Ford's Theatre, a short carriage drive from the White House. As Lincoln watched the play, John Wilkes Booth, an actor, shot the president and fled.

G. It is probably impossible to overestimate Queen Victoria’s importance to the British history of the 1800s. She took an active involvement in the affairs of state and strongly believed that Britain should rule much of the world as an empire. Indicating her role as an imperial leader, her official title as Queen of Great Britain and Ireland was changed in the late 1870s to also include the title Empress of India.