Uncertain Climes looks to the late nineteenth century to reveal how climate anxiety was a crucial element in the emergence of American modernity.

Even people who still refuse to accept the reality of human-induced climate change would have to agree that the topic has become inescapable in the United States in recent decades. But as Joseph Giacomelli shows in Uncertain Climes, this is actually nothing new: as far back as Gilded Age America, climate uncertainty has infused major debates on economic growth and national development.
 
In this ambitious examination of late-nineteenth-century understandings of climate, Giacomelli draws on the work of scientists, foresters, surveyors, and settlers to demonstrate how central the subject was to the emergence of American modernity. Amid constant concerns about volatile weather patterns and the use of natural resources, nineteenth-century Americans developed a multilayered discourse on climate and what it might mean for the nation’s future. Although climate science was still in its nascent stages during the Gilded Age, fears and hopes about climate change animated the overarching political struggles of the time, including expansion into the American West. Giacomelli makes clear that uncertainty was the common theme linking concerns about human-induced climate change with cultural worries about the sustainability of capitalist expansionism in an era remarkably similar to the United States’ unsettled present.
 

Joseph Giacomelli is assistant professor of environmental history at Duke Kunshan University.

Introduction: Questions “Forever Remain”

1 A Climate Fit for Civilization

2 Climate and Capitalism in the Great West and Beyond

3 In the Middle Border: Gustavus Hinrichs and His Network of Volunteer Observers

4 Fluid Geographies: Mapping Climate Change

Interlude: Rainmakers and Other “Paradoxers”

5 Mysterious Ecologies

6 Technocracy and the Mastery of Uncertainty

Conclusion: The Meanings of Uncertainty

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index