If this type of unbearable heat is going to be part of humanity’s long-term future, it behooves us to turn to history for precedents. Only in that way can we better understand what awaits us. “While ...

In the summer of 1858, a brutal heat wave turned the Thames into an unbearable sewage nightmare that drove lawmakers from Parliament and made sanitation impossible to ignore. This chapter follows the ...

FARGO — One of histories most devastating heat waves occurred in England in 1858. The summer unusually hot and many Londoners had replaced their chamber pots with an early form of mechanical toilet ...

Londoners may feel hot this summer, but historian Rosemary Ashton says it's nothing compared to what the city endured in 1858. That was the year of "The Great Stink" — when the Thames River, hot and ...

In the 19th century, Britain’s military and imperial might was so great that the country lorded over almost one-quarter of the world’s population. But on June 30, 1858, the UK government nearly ...

n the 19th century, thousands of gallons of raw sewage from across London was being dumped into the Thames every day. When a summer heatwave hit the city in 1858, it turned the river into a festering, ...

During London’s long summer of 1858, the sweltering temperatures spawned squalor. With a population of more than 2 million, London had outgrown its medieval waste-removal systems, turning Spenser’s ...

2 Russians, 2 Jews, and a Puerto Rican walk into a bar ...

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858. By Rosemary Ashton. Yale University Press; 338 pages; $30 and £25. IF YOU wanted to devote an entire book to a year in Victorian ...

Chris Turney consults for cleanech company CarbonScape (www.carbonscape.com) and receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about ...

In One Hot Summer, historian Rosemary Ashton follows Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Disraeli through an unpleasant couple of months... London Literally Stank In The Summer Of 1858 — Just ...