Climate in Words and Numbers: How Early Americans Recorded Weather in Almanacs

As we begin to consider climate as an everyday problem, it's valuable to see how people did that in the past. With support from the Guggenheim Foundation, Joyce Chaplin is compiling and analyzing a database of manuscript notes about weather in early American almanacs,1646-1821, out of 10,578 almanacs from nine different archives or libraries. Her talk focuses on how people recorded the weather in numbers (including degrees Fahrenheit) and in words, ranging from “dull” to “elegant!” These notations are significant as records of a period of climate change, the Little Ice Age, also as records of how people made sense of and coped with that climatic disruption.

The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. **This session does not have a pre-circulated paper. 

Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.