Climate and Early American Colonial History

Besides the challenge of learning and adapting to an unfamiliar climate, the first European settlements in North America encountered unusual extremes of cold and drought during the “Little Ice Age” of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This talk will examine ways that Europeans explorers and settlers tried (or failed) to understand the new American climate, and how climatic events may have shaped the history of the first Spanish, French, and English colonies.