Jul 23, 2007

burrrr-r-r-r

I watched Little Ice Age: Big Chill on the History Channel yesterday. If you get a chance to catch it, I recommend it. It made me wonder why we never learned this sort of thing in history class. I just remember trying to remember dates belonging to the Tet Offensive and the New Deal. While I recognize those events as important, they seemed quite dwarfed by “…a period of cataclysmic cold... It froze Viking colonists in Greenland, accelerated the Black Death in Europe, decimated the Spanish Armada, and helped trigger the French Revolution… New York Harbor froze and people walked from Manhattan to Staten Island, Eskimos sailed kayaks as far south as Scotland, and two feet of snow fell on New England in June and July during "the Year Without a Summer"…” It seemed to me that this is kind of a big deal in history.

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