On the Teeth of the Wind: Climate and Embodiment in the Antebellum American Empire

This presentation will explore the opportunities and challenges that arise in the study of a ubiquitous, yet elusive, element. How can scholars recover the layers of bodily experience and tacit knowledge that permeate the cultural, social, and political meanings of winds? How can we bind the study of winds, which by their very definition defy conventional boundaries of place and state? Using my work on winds in the antebellum Gulf South as a springboard, I will explore what is at stake in the study of winds and what it can reveal about broader cultural, political, and environmental trends in the past.

The direction, consistency, and temperature of the winds were central to nineteenth-century understandings of health and place. A kaleidoscopic array of winds—north, east, west, and south, but also trade winds, tropical winds, and sea breezes—swirled across the landscape and relentlessly engaged the body. In the Gulf South, the drive to eradicate expressions of non-white autonomy in the region and repopulate it with white citizens framed the impulse to make sense of these phenomena. Framed along the question of geographic imaginaries in and of the U.S. Gulf South, I show what can be gained from recovering the meanings ascribed to winds. Information on winds circulated in a mélange of special interest journals and popular publications. Physicians and residents used this knowledge to both differentiate their region and connect it to global currents in the world. Through an analysis of how we might recover winds in the past, I hope to spark a discussion on how these currents can implicate residents in intensely local experiences of climate that are at the same time yoked to broader patterns of race and place, trade and nation-building, climate and empire.