The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850

Brian Fagan is a renowned archaeologist with an engaging writing style. He looks at a 500 year period, now known as the Little Ice Age, and its affect on historical events. Fagan utilizes a variety of very interesting sources, like contemporary medieval journals, winery records and the business records of 14th century monastaries, to fill in his intriguing mosaic. This book isn't strictly about weather but about the interplay of global climate changes and civilization's struggle to survive. While Fagan doesn't disagree that man's use of fossil fuels may be adversely affecting our current global climate, one realizes by the end of the book that man has very little to do with how this planet moves, groans and changes. Ocean, wind, freezing, thawing, flooding, drought - we endure these things but we don't cause them and we cannot significantly alter them. The Earth moves at its own pace.

What I found most interesting about the book is the volume and wide variety of historical events that Fagan references, effectively lost to modern memory, but resurrected here for the curious.

The author of this book is not an environmental determinist, but he makes a plea for us to observe weather as best we can, not only in our time, but in history, and study its interplay with human social, political, artistic, and military activity. He speaks of ice cores, tree rings, contemporary chronicles, and even paintings as ways to recover information about the weather of the past, and his focus is of course the cold years in Europe between 1300 and 1850. The book is filled with vital details; it is filled with precisely stated and very readable observations about what weather has meant to people, what it might mean to us, and it urges us to be more conscious of what is happening with weather today. I found it extremely inviting and thought provoking, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in European history and art. There is tremendous scope here. Anyone interested in Global Warming ought certainly to read the book, too. Quite a pleasure. Quite a terrific book.

Superbly done. The book really hammers out the crucial points of how dramatic historical events were somehow related to violent climate shifts that lasted over 500 years.
The book examines origins of these violent climate shifts, discusses life during the middle ages and talks about intriguing topics of world events shaped by global climate. Such famous events are the French Revolution, Bubonic Plague of the 1300's, Potato Irish Famine, JamesTown to name just a few.
The Arthur is very to the point and uses excellent statistics and data to back things up.
Truly an epic book that will completely change your outlook on history forever.
Its only 200 pages and can be finished in a weekend. Get it and enjoy.

The book was in better condition than expected and arrived sooner than expected, Thank you.

This book is a social history of Western Europe and other areas from c.1500-1900. It describes how volcanos, sunspots, ocean currents and other natural phenomena unknown or unappreciated by these people affected their lives. It's an easy read full of anecdotes with a dose of science and the many methods scientists use to determine climate so long ago.
It's politically neutral and emphasizes the complex processes involved but it's essentially a social history of a period where Winters and Summers were highly variable without much human influence. A great read for an easy understanding of some of the complexities behind the "climate debate".