America's Colonial Beginnings through the Lens of an Environmental Historian: A Cold Welcome

The first Europeans to come to North America came woefully unprepared for the novel environments and climates they encountered here. Popular understanding equated climates with latitudes and vastly underestimated the stronger continental seasons on this side of the Atlantic. A cooling climate and large volcanic eruptions during the late 1500s only added to the challenges at hand. One expedition after another arrived in America and Canada only to collapse under the stress of droughts, freezing winters, and untimely storms. This presentation, drawn from the author’s book: A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America, retells early colonial history as a story of confusions, disasters, conflicts, and survival as Europeans met a harsh and uncertain climate. It offers a case study in how the combination of written and physical evidence, historical and paleoclimate records, might help us rethink our history and even offer insights for the present.
For more information on why he chose this particular project, see: "Background to: A Cold Welcome."
For more information on environmental history see: "What Is Environmental History?"