The Frigid Golden Age

Author: Dagomar Degroot
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108317588
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Book Description
Dagomar Degroot offers the first detailed analysis of how a society thrived amid the Little Ice Age, a period of climatic cooling that reached its chilliest point between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The precocious economy, unusual environment, and dynamic intellectual culture of the Dutch Republic in its seventeenth-century Golden Age allowed it to thrive as neighboring societies unraveled in the face of extremes in temperature and precipitation. By tracing the occasionally counterintuitive manifestations of climate change from global to local scales, Degroot finds that the Little Ice Age presented not only challenges for Dutch citizens but also opportunities that they aggressively exploited in conducting commerce, waging war, and creating culture. The overall success of their Republic in coping with climate change offers lessons that we would be wise to heed today, as we confront the growing crisis of global warming.

The Little Ice Age

Author: Brian Fagan
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541618572
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Only in the last decade have climatologists developed an accurate picture of yearly climate conditions in historical times. This development confirmed a long-standing suspicion: that the world endured a 500-year cold snap -- The Little Ice Age -- that lasted roughly from A.D. 1300 until 1850. The Little Ice Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable and often very cold years of modern European history, how climate altered historical events, and what they mean in the context of today's global warming. With its basis in cutting-edge science, The Little Ice Age offers a new perspective on familiar events. Renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan shows how the increasing cold affected Norse exploration; how changing sea temperatures caused English and Basque fishermen to follow vast shoals of cod all the way to the New World; how a generations-long subsistence crisis in France contributed to social disintegration and ultimately revolution; and how English efforts to improve farm productivity in the face of a deteriorating climate helped pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and hence for global warming. This is a fascinating, original book for anyone interested in history, climate, or the new subject of how they interact.

Global Crisis

Author: Geoffrey Parker
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300189192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 944

Book Description
The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis. Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

Nature's Mutiny

Author: Philipp Blom
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1509890424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description
Europe where the sun dares scarce appear For freezing meteors and congealed cold.' - Christopher Marlowe In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe. While hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the sixteenth century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and ‘frost fairs’ were erected on a frozen Thames – with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city. Recounting the deep legacy and sweeping consequences of this ‘Little Ice Age’, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had ineradicably changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, Blom brilliantly shows how they also gave rise to the growth of European cities, the appearance of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment. A sweeping examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature’s Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond.

The Frigid Golden Age

Author: Dagomar Degroot
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108419313
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Book Description
Explores the resilience of the Dutch Republic in the face of preindustrial climate change during the Little Ice Age.

A Cold Welcome

Author: Sam White
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674981340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
Cundill History Prize Finalist Longman–History Today Prize Finalist Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize “Meticulous environmental-historical detective work.” —Times Literary Supplement When Europeans first arrived in North America, they faced a cold new world. The average global temperature had dropped to lows unseen in millennia. The effects of this climactic upheaval were stark and unpredictable: blizzards and deep freezes, droughts and famines, winters in which everything froze, even the Rio Grande. A Cold Welcome tells the story of this crucial period, taking us from Europe’s earliest expeditions in unfamiliar landscapes to the perilous first winters in Quebec and Jamestown. As we confront our own uncertain future, it offers a powerful reminder of the unexpected risks of an unpredictable climate. “A remarkable journey through the complex impacts of the Little Ice Age on Colonial North America...This beautifully written, important book leaves us in no doubt that we ignore the chronicle of past climate change at our peril. I found it hard to put down.” —Brian Fagan, author of The Little Ice Age “Deeply researched and exciting...His fresh account of the climatic forces shaping the colonization of North America differs significantly from long-standing interpretations of those early calamities.” —New York Review of Books

The Little Ice Age

Author: Jean M. Grove
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134857462
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 869

Book Description
The evidence for the Little Ice Age, the most important fluctuation in global climate in historical times, is most dramatically represented by the advance of mountain glaciers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their retreat since about 1850. The effects on the landscape and the daily life of people have been particularly apparent in Norway and the Alps. This major book places an extensive body of material relating to Europe, in the form of documentary evidence of the history of the glaciers, their portrayal in paintings and maps, and measurements made by scientists and others, within a global perspective. It shows that the glacial history of mountain regions all over the world displays a similar pattern of climatic events. Furthermore, fluctuations on a comparable scale have occurred at intervals of a millennium or two throughout the last ten thousand years since the ice caps of North America and northwest Europe melted away. This is the first scholarly work devoted to the Little Ice Age, by an author whose research experience of the subject has been extensive. This book includes large numbers of maps, diagrams and photographs, many not published elsewhere, and very full bibliographies. It is a definitive work on the subject, and an excellent focus for the work of economic and social historians as well as glaciologists, climatologists, geographers, and specialists in mountain environment.

Tree Story

Author: Valerie Trouet
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421437783
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
What if the stories of trees and people are more closely linked than we ever imagined? Winner of the World Wildlife Fund's 2020 Jan Wolkers PrizeOne of Science News's "Favorite Books of 2020" A New York Times "New and Noteworthy" BookA 2020 Woodland Book of the YearGold Winner of the 2020 Foreword INDIES Award in Ecology & EnvironmentBronze Winner of the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Award in Environment/Ecology People across the world know that to tell how old a tree is, you count its rings. Few people, however, know that research into tree rings has also made amazing contributions to our understanding of Earth's climate history and its influences on human civilization over the past 2,000 years. In her captivating book Tree Story, Valerie Trouet reveals how the seemingly simple and relatively familiar concept of counting tree rings has inspired far-reaching scientific breakthroughs that illuminate the complex interactions between nature and people. Trouet, a leading tree-ring scientist, takes us out into the field, from remote African villages to radioactive Russian forests, offering readers an insider's look at tree-ring research, a discipline known as dendrochronology. Tracing her own professional journey while exploring dendrochronology's history and applications, Trouet describes the basics of how tell-tale tree cores are collected and dated with ring-by-ring precision, explaining the unexpected and momentous insights we've gained from the resulting samples. Blending popular science, travelogue, and cultural history, Tree Story highlights exciting findings of tree-ring research, including the fate of lost pirate treasure, successful strategies for surviving California wildfire, the secret to Genghis Khan's victories, the connection between Egyptian pharaohs and volcanoes, and even the role of olives in the fall of Rome. These fascinating tales are deftly woven together to show us how dendrochronology sheds light on global climate dynamics and uncovers the clear links between humans and our leafy neighbors. Trouet delights us with her dedication to the tangible appeal of studying trees, a discipline that has taken her to austere and beautiful landscapes around the globe and has enabled scientists to solve long-pondered mysteries of Earth and its human inhabitants.

The Last Pirate

Author: Tony Dokoupil
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307739481
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
A haunting and often hilarious memoir of growing up in 80s Miami as the son of Big Tony, a flawless model of the great American pot baron. To his fellow smugglers, Anthony Edward Dokoupil was the Old Man. He ran stateside operations for one of the largest marijuana rings of the twentieth century. In all they sold hundreds of thousands of pounds of marijuana, and Big Tony distributed at least fifty tons of it. To his son he was a rambling man who was also somehow a present father, a self-destructive addict who ruined everything but affection. Here Tony Dokoupil blends superb reportage with searing personal memories, presenting a probing chronicle of pot-smoking, drug-taking America from the perspective of the generation that grew up in the aftermath of the Great Stoned Age.

These Happy Golden Years

Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062484109
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
The eighth book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's treasured Little House series, and the recipient of a Newbery Honor—now available as an ebook! This digital version features Garth Williams's classic illustrations, which appear in vibrant full color on a full-color device and in rich black-and-white on all other devices. Fifteen-year-old Laura lives apart from her family for the first time, teaching school in a claim shanty twelve miles from home. She is very homesick, but she knows that her earnings can help pay for her sister Mary's tuition at the college for the blind. Only one thing gets her through the lonely weeks—every weekend, Almanzo Wilder arrives at the school to take Laura home for a visit. Friendship soon turns to love for Laura and Almanzo. The nine Little House books are inspired by Laura's own childhood and have been cherished by generations of readers as both a unique glimpse into America's frontier history and as heartwarming, unforgettable stories.