Session Abstract

Climate, and climate change, are global concerns in the early twenty-first century.  Yet climate has been a factor in all of human history, and a subject of inquiry, concern, and debate for centuries.  This roundtable session will investigate climate both as a factor in human history, and as a subject of inquiry, tracing the evolving perceptions of climate, from the emergence of climate science, to mistaken perceptions of climate, and how climate itself and perceptions of it shaped human history on a global scale.   The brief presentations in this session will range from regional histories to transnational ones, and they, like the collective discussion to follow, will interrogate climate, and perceptions of climate, in human history.

Franz Mauelshagen will examine the history of climatology, and its deep and ambivalent connections to European colonialism.  Sam White will explore how climatic events such as the Little Ice Age, as well as perceptions of climate, shaped the development of colonial North America.  Lawrence Culver will examine one of the most infamous examples of climate pseudoscience, the claim that “rain will follow the plow,” and its consequences in the nineteenth-century US, as well as in other settler societies.  Finally, Kevin Brown will explore how climatic perceptions shaped the economic and political histories of clear-cut timber regions in the U.S., from efforts to promote agrarian settlement in these regions to their histories during the New Deal.  Philip Garone will serve as moderator for the session.  Together, the session participants will investigate climate and perceptions of climate, and their roles in US and global history.  They will further illustrate how climate history informs environmental history, colonial and national histories, comparative and transnational histories, the history of science, and other subjects. 

If human history exists at the intersections of lives, places, and stories, then climate history can inform all three components of the AHA 2013 conference theme.  Climate shaped human lives, and it also determined the history of places.  The stories people told each other about climate, whether accurate or disastrously mistaken, shaped lives and places as well.  Climate exists at the core of many historical stories, lives, and places.  This session will attempt to illuminate some of them, and in so doing invite other historians to likewise more fully comprehend climate history, the history of perceptions and misperceptions of climate, and the role of each in human historical experience.