A Cold Welcome
eBook - PDF

A Cold Welcome

The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

A Cold Welcome

The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America

About this book

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

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Yes, you can access A Cold Welcome by Sam White in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Early American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Maps
  7. Author’s Note
  8. Introduction
  9. 1. Where Everything Must Be Burning
  10. 2. Such Great Snows We Thought We Were Dead Men
  11. 3. The Land Itself Would Wage War
  12. 4. Bitter Remedies
  13. 5. We Had Changed Summer with Winter
  14. 6. Destroyed with Cruel Disease
  15. 7. Our Former Hopes Were Frozen to Death
  16. 8. Winter for Eight Months and Hell for Four
  17. 9. Death Follows Us Everywhere
  18. 10. Such Wonders of Afflictions
  19. Conclusion
  20. Notes
  21. Acknowledgments
  22. Index