A Conversation with Dr. Sam White: Trump, the Little Ice Age, and Mapping Past Climate Changes

In the fifth episode of the Climate History Podcast, Dr. Dagomar Degroot interviews the first returning guest in the history of the podcast, Dr. Sam White of Ohio State University, the co-founder and co-director of the Climate History Network. Professor White is perhaps the leading environmental historian of the "Little Ice Age," a period of global cooling that, according to some definitions, endured from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries. 

In 2011, Cambridge University Press published Professor White's first book, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. In it, Professor White argues that falling temperatures and a landmark drought contributed to famines the Ottoman countryside that in turn incited a bloody rebellion. The book won the Middle East Studies Association Albert Hourani award, the Turkish Studies Association Fuat Köprülü award, and the British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society prize for the best book in Middle East and Turkish studies. Professor White has authored a major new book, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and America’s Colonial Beginnings, which is forthcoming with Harvard University Press. You can click here to watch Professor White discuss the book. 

In this episode, Professors Degroot and White discuss the prospects for climate research in the Trump Administration; the influence of the Little Ice Age on the European colonization of the Americas; and a major new digital mapping initiative that they are developing with the financial and logistical support of Georgetown University and the Ohio State University. 

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