A Cold Welcome

The extent to which humans have shaped and been shaped by the earth's climate has long been a topic of deep concern and endless contention. Building on a growing body of scholarship examining early modern climate, Sam White's A Cold Welcome and Anya Zilberstein's A Temperate Empire show that climatic conditions and the ideas they created fundamentally shaped the contours of North American colonization. Deeply researched and elegantly composed, both books reveal that we have much to learn from observing how actors in the past responded to a world in flux. By writing the Little Ice Age into some of the earliest sixteenth-century accounts of North American exploration and settlement, A Cold Welcome adds fresh perspective to the “forgotten century” of American history. White explains that early modern Europeans, still subscribing to ancient theory (which imagined “climates” as synonymous with bands of latitude), had anticipated a mild America. But when Spanish conquistadors faced violent storms and “shocking cold,” even in La Florida, their hopes were dashed (p. 33). Ships sank, and men succumbed to starvation, disease, and Indian attack. Ultimately, Spain's failure to colonize the Southeast, White explains, was rooted in an unwillingness to acknowledge the region's environmental limitations

Ancient history · Climate change · Economic history · Empire · Environmental history · Ethnology · Geography · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Settlement (finance · Temperate climate · White (mutation · Ecology · Geology · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Oceanography · Tree-ring climate responses