ADVANCED REVIEW Climate, history, and culture in the United States Sam White Department of History, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio Correspondence Sam White, Department of History, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210. Email: white.2426@osu.edu Edited by Matthias Heymann, Domain Editor, and Mike Hulme, Editor-in-Chief Although research in the field has faced obstacles, there is now a recognizable body of scholarship on climate in United States history and culture. This literature makes significant contributions to regional and national historiographies and to contemporary climate change issues. Most paleoclimate, historical, and archeologi- cal research pertaining to climate variability and impacts has focused on Native American histories and on the early colonial period, when European settlements were most vulnerable. Nevertheless, scholars have also investigated diverse ways in which regional climate differences and, above all, perceptions about American climates have shaped the modern history of the country. Research on climate and culture could make particularly significant contributions to topics such as Southern racism and slavery, Western migration and agriculture, and the rise of American suburbs. This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > World Historical Perspectives KEYWORDS Adaptation, climate, culture, history, United States 1 | INTRODUCTION The scholarship on climate in United States history and culture reflects the history and culture of the country itself. It is diverse, dynamic, inward-looking, and often provocative. Taken as a whole, it tells important stories about the promises and perils of colonialism, capitalism, and technology. This article critically reviews this growing body of scholarship with attention to its strengths and shortcomings and its potential to address contemporary concerns over climate change. It addresses “cli- mate” in a broad sense, including climate variability, impacts, and adaptations; regional climatic differences; and changing ideas about climate. Academic research on climate in U.S. history and culture has faced obstacles. First and foremost, climate remains tangen- tial to the central questions of race, class, gender, and politics that motivate most studies of American history (McNeill, 2018). Scholars have tended to overreact to the excesses of early twentieth-century climate determinism with an equally misleading “climate indeterminism” (Hulme, 2011). Though not unique to the United States, this problem has been especially severe in American scholarship, given the leading role of American geographers such as Ellen Semple and Ellsworth Huntington in pro- moting climate determinism and the use of climatic arguments to justify American slavery and racism, as described below. Also since the late twentieth century, U.S. universities have neglected human and historical geography, while American envi- ronmental history has emphasized human impacts on the environment rather than environmental factors in human history. The country's diversity, youth, and dynamism have hindered the creation of a national historical climatology in the mold of European countries. European settlers moved quickly across diverse landscapes with contrasting and variable climates; thus American climate history usually cannot draw on long-time series of phenological or weather observations to establish statisti- cal relationships with recurrent agricultural, social, or economic phenomena. Meteorological forces tend to get pushed into the background of technological, environmental, and demographic transformations. Or as William Meyer (2014, p. 6) has put it, Received: 26 June 2018 Revised: 28 August 2018 Accepted: 29 August 2018 DOI: 10.1002/wcc.556 WIREs Clim Change. 2018;e556. wires.wiley.com/climatechange © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 of 12 https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.556