As the pace of global warming accelerates, scholars in different disciplines work together to identify climate changes in the preindustrial past. Historians and anthropologists have argued that these changes repeatedly influenced the fortunes of sprawling empires and hunter-gatherer communities alike. As this “climate history” grows in popularity and legitimacy, teachers and professors have sought to incorporate it within high school and introductory college courses. Yet many quickly found that the field’s most important publications are either too technical, too dense, too narrowly focused, too expensive, or too dated for junior students. What they lacked was a slim survey that synthesized in plain language the most cutting-edge scholarship of humanity’s experience with climate change throughout history.
Enter Climate Change in Human History, a collaboration between Lieberman, a wide-ranging twentieth-century historian, and Gordon, a geoscientist. In just 193 pages, Lieberman and Gordon take students from the end of the great Ice...