Abstract
This chapter outlines the available sources and studies for the climate history of North America c.1500–1800. Although most US and Canadian climate history for the period has relied on evidence from the archives of nature, Spanish, French, and English colonial records provide an expanding source base for historical climatology. Early instrumental records, phenological observations, newspapers, almanacs, and weather diaries become particularly important for studying climate and weather reconstruction and impacts around the mid-1700s. The chapter concludes with a review of three important episodes in North American climate history: Europe’s first colonial expeditions to North America, the “Late Maunder Minimum” of the 1680s–1690s, and the US War of Independence of the 1770s–1780s.
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Notes
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- 2.
- 3.
Official archives in Santa Fe were destroyed in the Pueblo Revolt of the 1680s, creating a gap in those records.
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E.g., Quinn and Quinn, 1978 for English colonial sources, and the Cibola Project—https://escholarship.org/uc/rcrs_ias_ucb_cibola (last accessed April 14, 2016)—for the Spanish south-west.
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The Archivo de Indias in Seville has made many of these series, such as the Cartas de Gobiernas from Spanish Florida, available online through http://pares.mcu.es/ (last accessed April 14, 2016).
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Described in Hoffman, 2002, 126–28.
- 8.
Grandjean, 2011.
- 9.
See especially Thwaites, 1896.
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See examples in, e.g., White, 2015a.
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Baron, 1995.
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Mock, 2012.
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Slonosky, 2003.
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Baron, 1995, 74–91.
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Pages 2k Consortium, 2013.
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Kupperman, 1982.
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Kupperman, 1984.
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Wickman, 2015.
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Johnson, 2005.
- 28.
McNeill, 2010.
- 29.
- 30.
Meyer, 2000, 6.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Vicky Slonosky for her comments and for sharing material. Any errors are entirely my own.
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White, S. (2018). North American Climate History (1500–1800). In: White, S., Pfister, C., Mauelshagen, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_24
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