An Introduction to Climate and Human History

Undergraduate

Climate and weather have shaped human societies across the full span of recorded history, yet for much of the twentieth century historians largely ignored environmental forces in favor of political, economic, and social explanations. This seminar traces the emergence of climate history as a serious scholarly discipline, from its early roots in the Annales school through the recent integration of paleoclimate science — ice cores, tree rings, volcanic forcing records — with traditional historical methods. We begin with the foundational texts that established the intellectual framework for environmental history, before turning to a series of case studies spanning the ancient Mediterranean, medieval Europe, early modern Asia, and the modern world. Each case study asks how climate stress — drought, volcanic cooling, flood, and plague — interacted with existing political, economic, and social structures to produce historical outcomes. We pay particular attention to the problem of causation: how do historians distinguish climate's role from the many other forces shaping human events? By the end of the seminar, students are equipped to read both historical and scientific literature critically, to evaluate competing causal claims, and to situate contemporary climate change within the longer arc of human-environment interaction. WR , HU Th 1:30pm-3:25pm