Winter in America: A Social and Environmental History

3 units

This course looks closely at winter in North America from the Little Ice Age of c.1550-1700 through to today's era of melting glaciers in Greenland. Topics include: interest in the winter solstice in ancient Cahokia; telling references to winter weather in the writings of the United States' founding generation, and in nineteenth and twentieth-century newspapers; the social history of how the appearance of snowmen evolved; epic snowball fights from the era of the American Revolution through the Civil War and beyond; differing experiences of snowstorms in rural and urban areas, and by race, gender, and class; the history of snow days in American schools; and the remarkable story of Vermont's Snowflake Man, farmer Wilson Bentley, whose microphotographs of snowflakes, taken between 1885 and 1931, are still studied by environmental historians and artists.