Climate
The
history of weather may seem more than a bit esoteric to many readers
of this bibliography, but there are historians and historical
geographers who think it important, and there is a small body
of literature on the subject. There are several general works
on aberrant weather in history and great storms of New England,
such as David Ludlum's Early American Hurricanes, 1492-1870
(Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1963). The basic work
for Connecticut is Joseph J. Brumbach, "The Climate of Connecticut,"
Bulletin no. 99 of the State Geological and Natural History
Survey (1965). Brumbach’s work replaces the older Bulletin
no. 61 (1939), Joseph Milton Kirk’s "The Weather and Climate
of Connecticut" Bulletin no. 659 of the Connecticut Agricultural
Experiment Station (New Haven) is C. Bingham’s "The Climate
of the Northeast Probabilities of Weekly Averages of the Daily
Temperature Maximum Minimum, and Range" (1963). Serious scholars
will not want to miss Karen Ordhal Kupperman’s "The Puzzle
of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period," American
Historical Review 87 (December, 1982) 5:1262-89 Seventeenth-century
geographers did not understand why places at the same latitude
didn't have the same climate Why wasn't Boston much warmer than
London?
Researchers
will find a great deal of interesting material in the series run,
in the Connecticut Quarterly Magazine, 1896-1908, called
"Country Life in Connecticut." There are dozens of photographs
of snow and ice storms, as well as flood and drought damage at
the turn of the century. Another useful source is the Annual
Reports of the Connecticut Society of Civil Engineers, in
which considerable attention is paid to the impact of storms on
the man-made environment. For example, the hurricane of 1938 gets
full play in the Report of 1939, and the 1955 flood is
treated at length in the 1956 Report. Don't miss the Annual
Report of 1938, which consists of papers given at a "Symposium
on Flood Control, Connecticut River Valley," especially Sanford
H. Wadhams’ "Historical Account of the Flood Control Compacts
for the Connecticut River," pages 49-92. See also the work
by William Leuchtenberg. Other accounts of storms can be located
by looking in the cumulative index in the 1949 Report under
"Floods," "Water," etc. The most amazing weather
phenomenon to hit this area in historical memory occurred in 1816-17
when there were freezing temperatures and frost in sixteen consecutive
months. That freezing temperatures story is told in Barrows Mussey’s
"Yankee Chills, Ohio Fever," in New England Quarterly
24 (December, 1949)4:435-49; and in Barrows Mussey and S. L. Vigilante,
"’Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death’: The Cold Summer of
1816 and Westward Migration from New England," in Bulletin
of the New York Public Library 52(September, 1948):454-57 Both
articles deal with the cold and resultant food shortage as a cause
for emigration from Connecticut. The hurricane of 1938 is recorded
in several picture books, and Connecticut Woodlands devoted
an entire issue to it 3(November, 1938) 4. It gave another issue--20(November.
1955)6--entirely to the flood of 1955.
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