by Rich Wandschneider | Jan 16, 2020 | Australian fires, Brian Fagan, Cahokia, chaco canyon, climate, great warming, little ice age, Philippines volcano
With fires raging and people fleeing to the sea in Australia, and evacuations in the Philippines in the face of volcanoes, I think about all the instances of weather and climate that have changed the shape of world populations. The few that I know about are certainly...
by Rich Wandschneider | Oct 29, 2019 | Brian Fagan, California fires, climate change, fire, fire suppression, Indian use of fire, living with fire, The Great Warming
About 700 or 800 years ago—more detailed times and accounts of them are in a book called The Great Warming, by Brian Fagan—California shriveled in drought, and much of it died. Half the live oak trees and half the people who depended on them as a major food source...
by Rich Wandschneider | Jan 9, 2017 | Brian Fagan, California live oaks, climate change; little ice age, great warming, Mayan collapse
I’ve not gone back to look at past winter temperatures and snowfall statistics on Wallowa County, but I know the 40 degrees on the outside thermometer as I write this, and the wind doing the warming, are breaking a month-long cold chill. “This is the coldest it’s been...
by Rich Wandschneider | Jun 21, 2014 | Black Death, Brian Fagan, Father Desmet, Marcus Whitman, Plague, Salem witch trials, smallpox, Weyakin
Smallpox didn’t rate a line in the ‘Western Civilization textbook that I used in 1961—The Course of Civilization, by Strayer, Gatzke, and Harison. In fact, the Plague, or Black Death, which some now think wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the mid fourteenth...
by Rich Wandschneider | Feb 24, 2014 | Alfred Crosby, Alvin Josephy, Brian Fagan, chaco canyon, climate change, global warming, greenland, little ice age, Medieval warming
In my last blog I wrote about an interview I came across with Alfred Crosby, historian and author of “The Columbian Exchange.” Crosby said that he had tired of teaching the standard American history of Washington and Jefferson, and, looking for deeper stories of early...
