The Influence of Climate on History

Weather has affected the course of history more often than you might think. In The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (Basic Books), Brian Fagan, a professor of archaeology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, focuses on the revelations that recent advances in climatology have made about the role that an episodic but prolonged temperature drop played in the history of Western civilization. He looks at the cold spell's effect on Norse exploration, European

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