The Little Ice Age in the Dutch North Atlantic
Read More about the Little Ice Age
Although the Dutch Republic thrived during this “Little Ice Age,” the Amsterdam-based Dutch West India Company struggled to establish and maintain its New World colony of New Netherland between 1624 and 1664.
Join environmental historian Dagomar Degroot and historical geographer Chelsea Teale as they explore how weather, climate, and societal responses to those phenomena impacted life in the North Atlantic from Europe to Eastern North America.
Dr. Dagomar Degroot is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. His first book, The Frigid Golden Age, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018 and named by the Financial Times as one of the ten best history books of that year. His next book, Ripples in the Cosmic Ocean, is under contract with Harvard University Press and Viking. He publishes equally in historical and scientific journals, including Nature and the American Historical Review, and writes for a popular audience in, for example, the Washington Post, Aeon Magazine, and The Conversation. He maintains popular online resources on the history of climate change, including the podcast Climate History. He has shared the unique perspectives of the past with policymakers, corporate leaders, and journalists in many countries, from Wuhan to Washington, DC.
Dr. Chelsea Teale is a lecturer in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Analysis at Cal Poly Humboldt. Her research has emphasized the integration of proxy records (primarily plant fossils and tree rings) with written sources to reconstruct past environments, and she has published and presented work for both history and science audiences (such as Agricultural History Review and the Canadian and American Quaternary Associations). Her current project is a climate history of New Netherland, which will be the first chapter in a book tentatively entitled Environmental Encounters in Dutch New York. The book builds on her dissertation—focused on land use in the Dutch-settled northeast—by including the elements of climate, weather, flora, fauna, and other natural resources.
Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Among his many books, he is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York and the coauthor of All Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York. He has written for scholarly journals, newspapers and magazines, and worked with museums and the media to share history with the public. He served as senior research consultant for Ric Burns’ eight-episode award winning series New York: A Documentary, which aired on PBS starting in 1999. He is a former Fulbright lecturer in American Studies in Korea and a member of the New York Academy of History. Rob received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from New York University.
