A cold welcome

When Europeans first arrived in North America, they found an often harsh and unfamiliar land in the grip of the coldest age for millennia: the "Little Ice Age." Spanish, French, and English alike faced a century of disasters, setbacks, and failures on the way to their first enduring footholds on the continent. All the while, the vagaries and extremes of North America's Little Ice Age climate posed new threats and challenges, shaping the course of colonial history. A Cold Welcome tells the fascinating and often forgotten tale of Europe's first encounters with a new continent, and the first…