A Cold Welcome

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

Sam White

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780674244900
  9780674971929
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674981331
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Primordi della storia americana

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

Table of contents

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