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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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THE LITTLE ICE AGE

Brian Fagan

How Climate Made History 1300 - 1850

The groundbreaking history of how climate change transformed Europe and the world, from a renowned archaeologist -- updated with a new preface on the latest climate research
The Little Ice Age tells the fascinating story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history. Using sources ranging from the dates of long-ago wine harvests and the business records of medieval monasteries to modern chemical analysis of ice cores, renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan reveals how a 500-year cold snap began in the fourteenth century. As Fagan shows, the increasingly cold and stormy weather dramatically altered fishing and farming practices, and it shaped familiar events, from Norse exploration to the settlement of North America, from the French Revolution to the Irish potato famine to the Industrial Revolution.

Now updated with a new preface discussing the latest historical climate research, The Little Ice Age offers deeply important context for understanding today's age of global warming. As the Little Ice Age shows, climate change does not come in gentle, easy stages, and its influence on human life is profound.

Brian Fagan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has written many internationally acclaimed popular books about archaeology, including The Little Ice Age, The Great Warming, and The Long Summer. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.
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Published 2019-11-26 by Basic Books

Comments

Fagan shows in this wonderful book how vulnerable human society is to climatic zigzags.

Even without the contemporary relevance lent the book by the specter of global warming, The Little Ice Age would be an engrossing historical volume.

The Little Ice Age could do for the historical study of climate what Foucault's Madness and Civilization did for the historical study of mental illness: make it a respectable subject for scholarly inquiry.

A nimble, lively, provocative book.

[A] highly readable and erudite analysis.