It wasn't just potatoes

The IIrish history podcast has a series on the Great Famine in Ireland.

but the problem wasn't just the potato, nor were the deaths from hunger limited to Ireland, as Mike Duncan points out in his "Revolutions" series.

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the problem? other crops failed too due to the weather, so the price of food went up too high for poor people.

Physorg has a post noting that this was also why many Germans fled to the Americas at that time.

"Overall, we found that climate indirectly explains up to 20-30% of migration from Southwest Germany to North America in the 19th century," says Rüdiger Glaser, a professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and lead-author of the Climate of the Past study.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-climate-triggered-immigration-america-19th.html#jCp

Catholic encyclopedia has a history of immigrant Germans: some came for religious freedom but others for political or economic reasons, but notes the huge flow starting with the German revolutions of 1848...


in other words, not climate change per se but periodic famines due to weather that exacerbated the revolutions at that time, and a lot of people said the hell with it let's leave.

Sound familiar?


By the way: All of Mike Duncan's series are worth your listening time. His past series on Rome was excellent, (some can be found on Internet archives) and he now has a book on the deterioration of the Roman republic that was the back ground for the fall of the Republic a century later: The Storm before the Storm. which I haven't read but if it's as good as his Rome podcasts should be good.