When Good Climates Go Bad: Pivot Phases, Extreme Events, and the Opportunities for Climate History

摘要

This essay hypothesizes that as the earth moves from one temperature norm to another (pivot phases), extreme weather events may occur and may become the catalyst for historical processes. Extreme weather conditions-severe drought and storm events-were present on the frontier between English Carolina and Spanish Florida in the late 1730s, suggesting the presence of one such chronological horizon of disequilibrium. Weather conditions impacted all sectors of society, but, until now, only two groups have been studied to any degree: a group of slave fugitives from Carolina who successfully escaped to Spanish Florida in 1738 and a second group who attempted but failed to escape barely a year later in 1739. This essay revisits the success of the Mose fugitives as compared to the failure of the Stono rebels, and both groups' experiences are contextualized within the regionwide social dislocation caused by extreme weather events.