Ogres and Omnivores: Early American Historians and Climate History

Abstract

Odds are, you’re an ogre. You glut yourself on human flesh, slurping the blood, gnawing that which is still slippery, pausing only to scorch the meat and add some salt (maybe). By definition you crave the flesh of your own kind because, if you’re reading the William and Mary Quarterly, you’re some sort of historian. As the great French historian Marc Bloch wrote, “it is human beings that the historian is trying to discern. . . . The true historian is like the ogre in the story: wherever he smells human flesh he recognizes his prey.”1 “Nicely put,” countered Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “but in spite of my immense admiration for Marc Bloch his definition has always seemed to me too narrow.” Le Roy Ladurie was not suggesting that we historians give up cannibalism but that we learn to be omnivores. To the human-centered topics of conventional historical inquiry, he added nature, specifically climate: “meteorological observations, phenological and glaciological texts, comments on climatological events, and so on.” This Forum in the William and Mary Quarterly looks at that “so on,” the natural but nonhuman parts of the past that historians of climate study because they are omnivores. The climate historian declines the steak and yet is not a vegetarian. (A vegan, according to the Bloch–Le Roy Ladurie definition, would be a scientist who ignores humans entirely.) Human flesh alone is poor intellectual meat because it is so artificially isolated from whatever sustains it in life. Le Roy Ladurie preferred his flesh as lardons, cut up small, crisply fried, and strewn atop frisee. Sound tasty? Keep reading.2