The William and Mary Quarterly

Climate is the crucial issue of our era because significant changes to it will change everything else in nature, with terrible implications for the quality of human life and for the observance of justice among peoples and nations. Climate thus alters what it means to be a historian. “The true historian is like the ogre in the story,” the great French historian Marc Bloch once wrote: “wherever he smells human flesh he recognizes his prey.” “Nicely put,” countered Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “but in spite of my immense admiration for Marc Bloch his definition has always seemed to me too narrow.” Le Roy Ladurie wanted historians to be omnivores. To the human-centered topics of conventional historical inquiry, he added a nonhuman part of nature, climate. The field of climate history is now blossoming. Early Americanists can (and should) make contributions to it that no other scholars could provide. We study what happened when one part of the globe, the Americas, was integrated into the rest after a long physical and cultural isolation. Climate studies prompt us to consider the physical and cultural dimensions of that reintegration together and to show other scholars how this conjoined interrogation of nature and culture can be done.