MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History

Date: 

Friday, October 18, 2019, 2:30pm to 4:30pm

Location: 

MIT - Building E51, Room 095, Corner of Amherst & Wadsworth Streets, Cambridge, MA

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

Joyce Chaplin
Professor of Early American History
Harvard University

Weather records

 

 

 

 


With support from the Guggenheim Foundation, Joyce Chaplin is compiling a database of manuscript notes about the weather in early American almanacs, 1637-1820. Her talk focuses on how people recorded 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.

This event is part of the MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History sponsored by the History Faculty and the Program in Science, Technology and Society. For more information contact kalopes@mit.edu