A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and the First European Colonies in North America - Sam White, Oberlin College January 27, 2012

1210 Heller Hall
Sponsored by the Center for Early Modern History and the Institute for Advanced Study

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.

Sam White is an assistant professor of History at Oberlin College. His research focuses on the early modern world and on climate and history. He is the author of The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011), “Rethinking Disease in Ottoman History” (International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2010), “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History” (Environmental History, 2011), and “Middle East Environmental History: Ideas from an Emerging Field” (World History Connected, 2011).

Official Website: http://www.cemh.umn.edu