"Snow Scenes'': Exploring the Role of Memory and Place in Commemorating Extreme Winters

Scholars are increasingly focusing on the cultural dimensions of climate, addressing how individuals construct their understanding of climate through local weather. Research often focuses on the importance of widespread conceptualizations of mundane everyday weather, although attention has also been paid to extreme weather events and their potential effect on popular understandings of local climate. This paper introduces the “Snow Scenes” project, which aimed to engage rural communities in Cumbria, England, with their memories of extreme and severe past winter conditions in the region. Collating memories across a wide demographic, using a variety of methods, individual memories were analyzed alongside meteorological and historical records. By exploring these memories and their associated artifacts, this paper aims to better understand the role of memory and place in commemorating extreme winters. First, it is demonstrated how national narratives of exceptional winters are used by individuals as benchmarks against which to gauge conditions. Second, this paper identifies how specific locations and landmarks help to place memories and are shown to be important anchors for individuals’ understanding of their climate. Third, the paper considers how memories of severe winters are often nostalgic in their outlook, with a strong association between snowy winters, childhood, and childhood places. Fourth, it is illustrated how such events are regularly connected to important personal or familial milestones. Finally, the paper reflects on how these local-level experiences of historical extreme events may be central to the shaping of popular understandings of climate and also, by extension, climate change

Social and environmental change in Colonial Michoacan, west central Mexico.

The fall out from the Quincentennial anniversary of the "discovery" of the Americas has yet to settle. One of the key issues still in need of address concerns the nature of the social and environmental change wrought by colonialism. Until recently, research in this field has been determined by a series of antiquated myths, largely creations of Eurocentric Renaissance and Romantic philosophies. This study aims to provide a more objective insight into the degree of regional Colonial impact by focusing on an archival reconstruction of post-Conquest social and environmental change in the highlands ofMichoacan, west central Mexico. Archival evidence suggests that the Spanish encountered an already degraded landscape in this region, reflective of several centuries of pre-Hispanic settlement and exploitation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, little evidence emerges to suggest that there was an immediate and deleterious environmental impact following European contact, despite the introduction of livestock and plough technology to an area where they had hitherto been absent. Indeed, tangible evidence of ecological disturbance in the area does not emerge until the 18th century - a period recognised to have been one of population recovery and resource monopolisation. A detailed survey of litigation documents suggests that this period witnessed an acceleration in the number of indigenous claims for land reinstatement, concomitant with a marked increase in the number of references to infertile and degraded territory and apparent heightened concern over water sources. It is here argued that de-intensification of land use in the wake of indigenous depopulation and the imposition of conservative land use practices accounts for the negligible environmental impact in the early post-Conquest period. By the later 17th and 18th centuries, progressive climatic drying, population expansion, resource monopolisation and social inequality had combined to create a period of acute resource stress and landscape instability and consequent civil unrest. It was this untenable situation that was to play itself out in the Wars of Independence that characterised the first two decades of the 19th century

Drought and disaster in a revolutionary age: colonial Antigua during the American Independence War

The American War of Independence (1775-1783) spelled crisis for the British West Indies. Trade embargos between rebelling and loyal territories, losses to American pirates and hostilities with other European states left the Crown’s tropical Atlantic colonies short of the imported supplies that normally sustained their populations and commerce. Historians have studied the dynamics and consequences of these developments in considerable detail, at both regional and local scales, but have tended to focus on economic, social and political dimensions of the subject matter. Although some investigations have highlighted that climate variability compounded agricultural and subsistence problems in certain locations, the role of climate has rarely been subject to the same level of scrutiny. The present paper addresses this theme by focusing on the Lesser Antillean island of Antigua and the severe drought which gripped the colony during the war period. Through extensive analysis of original, largely unpublished archival sources, the implications of deficient rainfall for human livelihoods, fiscal stability and governmental crisis management are examined. By supplementing findings with evidence from other episodes of warfare which coincided with extreme climate phenomena in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it is argued that successive years of drought were pivotal in defining the severe human and economic losses sustained in Antigua during the American independence conflict. The critical agency of this weather event must, however, be understood as the product of its dynamic interaction with the precarious backdrop of a colonial regime under profound socio-economic and geopolitical stress

Gordon Valentine Manley and his contribution to the study of climate change: a review of his life and work

British climatologist and geographer, Gordon Manley (1902–1980), is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on climate variability in the UK, for establishing the Central England Temperature series and, for his pivotal role in demonstrating the powerful relationship between climate, weather, and culture in post-World War II Britain. Yet Manley made many contributions, both professional and popular, to climate change debates in the twentieth century, where climate change is broadly understood to be changes over a range of temporal and spatial scales rather than anthropogenic warming per se. This review first establishes how Manley's work, including that on snow and ice, was influenced by key figures in debates over climatic amelioration around the North Atlantic between 1920s and 1950s. His research exploring historical climate variability in the UK using documentary sources is then discussed. His perspectives on the relationship between climate changes and cultural history are reviewed, paying particular attention to his interpretation of this relationship as it played out in the UK. Throughout, the review aims to show Manley to be a fieldworker and an empiricist and reveals how he remained committed to rigorous scientific investigation despite changing trends within his academic discipline

Water and vertical territory: the volatile and hidden historical geographies of Derbyshire’s lead mining soughs, 1650s–1830s

This paper is concerned with the complex subterranean politics of lead mining in the Derbyshire Peak District. We focus specifically on the implications of lead mining ‘soughs’ – underground channels driven to drain water out of mines to allow for mineral extraction. Built during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, soughs were substantial, capital and labour intensive projects which served a key function in the refashioning of subterranean and surface hydrological landscapes. They were ‘driven’ at a time when water was both a major hindrance to mining endeavour and the primary energy source for industrial expansion, such that historical disputes surrounding sough drainage were common. Here, we draw on unpublished historical legal records to explore the ways in which vertical conceptualisations of space were central to the legal discourse over soughs and extend the so called ‘vertical turn’ in geography to include subterranean proto-historical landscapes. Drawing on a high profile conflict between English entrepreneur Richard Arkwright and Conservative politician Francis Hurt, we go some way to addressing recent claims for more ethnographic detail in studies of verticality by considering the people who legally and physically negotiated sough development below as well as above ground. We also illustrate the range of temporalities which framed sough developments and highlight the cross-generational nature of the legal disputes over soughs and the productive landscapes they drained

Climate, Conflict and Society: Changing Responses to Weather Extremes in Nineteenth Century Zululand

Changing climates affect human societies differently depending on societal structures, cultural perceptions and their relative vulnerability and resilience. In this study, we explore the complex relationship between climate, conflict and society in nineteenth century Zululand. The paper first reviews current debates surrounding the links between climatic change, societal transformation and the rise of the Zulu Kingdom from the late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth centuries. It then considers new empirical evidence relating to conflict and socio-economic changes at a local scale in Zululand from the early-mid-nineteenth century onwards, using a combination of unpublished archival materials written by missionaries and other observers, together with oral histories and traditions. Our analysis highlights how changing precipitation patterns, especially towards drier conditions, may have contributed to changes in societal responses, including dominant narratives about rain-control, the migration and dissolution of society, and conflicts and unrest. We suggest that temporal differences in these responses were contingent upon the role of leaders, power structures, and the willingness and ability of leaders to yield this power. The case of nineteenth century Zululand exemplifies the complexity of environment-society interactions, and strengthens the call for a thorough scrutiny of the narratives of social unrest in specific socio-cultural contexts

Climate, conflict and society: changing responses to weather extremes in nineteenth century Zululand

Changing climates affect human societies differently depending on societal structures, cultural perceptions and their relative vulnerability and resilience. In this study, we explore the complex relationship between climate, conflict and society in nineteenth century Zululand. The paper first reviews current debates surrounding the links between climatic change, societal transformation and the rise of the Zulu Kingdom from the late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth centuries. It then considers new empirical evidence relating to conflict and socio-economic changes at a local scale in Zululand from the early-mid-nineteenth century onwards, using a combination of unpublished archival materials written by missionaries and other observers, together with oral histories and traditions. Our analysis highlights how changing precipitation patterns, especially towards drier conditions, may have contributed to changes in societal responses, including dominant narratives about rain-control, the migration and dissolution of society, and conflicts and unrest. We suggest that temporal differences in these responses were contingent upon the role of leaders, power structures, and the willingness and ability of leaders to yield this power. The case of nineteenth century Zululand exemplifies the complexity of environment-society interactions, and strengthens the call for a thorough scrutiny of the narratives of social unrest in specific socio-cultural contexts

Dealing with the deluge of historical weather data: the example of the TEMPEST database

People have long been interested in the history of weather, particularly extremes, and chronologies of past events drawing on information from written records, have been compiled and published throughout history. In recent years, concern over current and future weather and climate has triggered a new level of interest in past weather events and their impacts. This interest, alongside the development of digital humanities research methods has resulted in a rapid growth in the number of online databases relating to historic weather and climate around the world. This paper reviews this expansion with reference to a range of examples, before documenting the design and creation of one such database, TEMPEST, an online repository for extreme weather history in the UK. TEMPEST has been created as the major output of the AHRC funded project ?Spaces of Experience and Horizons of Expectation: Extreme Weather in the UK, Past, Present and Future? (2013-2016). Unlike the majority of existing databases that rely on published materials, TEMPEST?s records are drawn from primary research into original documentary sources held in archives around the UK. The c. 18,000 records that TEMPEST currently contains offer personalised and geo-referenced insights into the relationship between society and extreme weather in the UK spanning a period of over 400 years. We conclude this paper by outlining some potential applications for TEMPEST, and suggesting directions for future research and resources in historical weather. We also consider broader issues for the digital humanities.publishersversionPeer reviewe