The History of Climate and Society: Old Problems and New Possibilities

• In Event: Towards Better Histories of Climate and Society: Investigating Late Antique and Medieval Climate Change

Abstract

Historians are important contributors to a fast-growing, multidisciplinary effort that seeks to identify how past populations coped with climate changes. This scholarship, recently synthesized as the History of Climate and Society (HCS), also includes archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, linguists, and paleoclimatologists. By revealing that climate change long influenced human actions and beliefs, it has upended how many scholars understand historical causality. Yet this paper argues that its quest to include climate change among the forces that shaped human affairs has long been undermined by assumptions and practices dating back to its troubled origins. The paper outlines a new research framework for undertaking HCS scholarship, and explores how novel methods, models, and themes may yield more convincing histories of human responses to climate change.

Author

• Dagomar Degroot, Georgetown University