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Loading... A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (2017)by Sam White
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. All in all this is a very fine examination of the impact of climate, and of climate knowledge (or the lack thereof), on the Early Modern efforts of the European nations to gain a foothold in what is now Canada and the United States. If the impact of the Little Ice Age (and of assorted major volcanic eruptions) wasn't enough of a barrier to European efforts to create overseas footholds, White spends much time dealing with the European misconceptions regarding the climactic conditions they were going to be subjected to. For too long they thought they would encounter relatively mild conditions, instead of the "continental" climate with its relative extremes of winter and summer. To a large degree it was only sheer stubbornness and a bit of dumb luck that allowed early settlements at Jamestown, Quebec, St. Augustine and Santa Fe to survive until adaptation to the new reality could take place (the French being the possible exception). Highly recommended. no reviews | add a review
When Europeans first arrived in North America, they found an often harsh and unfamiliar land in the grip of the coldest age for millennia: the "Little Ice Age." Spanish, French, and English alike faced a century of disasters, setbacks, and failures on the way to their first enduring footholds on the continent. All the while, the vagaries and extremes of North America's Little Ice Age climate posed new threats and challenges, shaping the course of colonial history. A Cold Welcome tells the fascinating and often forgotten tale of Europe's first encounters with a new continent, and the first settlements of the US and Canada. Drawing on wide-ranging interdisciplinary research in many languages, Sam White brings together the parallel histories of the Spanish, French, and English in North America, and the Native Americans they encountered, from the earliest expeditions to the perilous first winters at Jamestown, Quebec, and Santa Fe. A Cold Welcome weaves together evidence from climatology, archaeology, and human history to tell a new story of America's colonial beginnings--one both novel and yet relevant and familiar for a world now facing an uncertain future of environmental and climatic change.-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)970.01History and Geography North America North America North America -1599LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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*I don't personally know how tree rings are read and calculated beyond the physical counting of rings to tell years but am going off what the author states. The author states that tree ring data are proxy data (a proxy is not direct but something that stands in place of something else) that are imperfect for data analysis but then states his analysis and interpretation are true, accurate, and unquestionable facts about winter weather. He mentions only once that proxy data are imperfect but then goes on to take that data as if it were direct data. ( )