Dagomar_Degroot Knowpia

Dagomar Degroot (born February 26, 1985) is an environmental historian, author, and professor at Georgetown University. He co-founded the Climate History Network, an organization of scholars who study past climate change, and established HistoricalClimatology.com, a popular website that explains why studying past climate change matters today.^[1] In 2018, he published a book, The Frigid Golden Age, that argues that the Dutch Republic - precursor state to the present-day Netherlands - was resilient and even adaptive in the face of a period of cold climate known as the Little Ice Age. The book was named by the Financial Times as one of the top ten history books of 2018.^[2]

Life and education edit

Degroot was born in Raamsdonksveer, the Netherlands, in 1985. He emigrated to Canada in 1985, and in 2007 completed a B.A in History and English at McMaster University. After earning an M.A. in history from McMaster in 2008, he received his PhD from York University in 2014. He completed one year of a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Western Ontario before joining Georgetown University as an assistant professor in 2015.^[3]

Research edit

Degroot argues that environmental changes - on Earth and across the solar system - have had a greater influence on human history than commonly assumed. He is among the first historians to write about the success of societies and communities in coping with past climate change.^[4] His work on the Dutch Republic shows that the famous seventeenth-century "Golden Age" of the Republic owed much to the flexibility of the Dutch in coping with a changing climate, and exploiting the less fortunate.^[5]

His publications on social responses to climate change in the Arctic, and on relationships between climate change and human conflict, reveal that the impacts of climatic variability on people and on local environments are complex and often counter-intuitive. His new book project, Civilization and the Cosmos, is under contract with Harvard University Press and Viking Press. It argues that changes in different environments across the Solar System have influenced human history in previously unrecognized ways.^[1]

Select bibliography edit

Books edit

The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2018. ISBN 978-1-108-41931-4.

Journal articles edit

Degroot, Dagomar (May–June 2018). "Climate Change and Society in the 15th to 18th Centuries". Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. 9 (3): e518. doi:10.1002/wcc.518.
Degroot, Dagomar (January 2017). "A Catastrophe Happening in Front of Our Very Eyes: The Environmental History of a Comet Crash on Jupiter". Environmental History. 22 (1): 239–273. doi:10.1093/envhis/emw067.
Degroot, Dagomar (May 2014). "Never such weather known in these seas': Climatic Fluctuations and the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century, 1652-1674". Environment and History. 20 (2): 239–273. doi:10.3197/096734014X13941952681034.

References edit

^ ^a ^b "DagomarDegroot.com". DagomarDegroot.com. Weebly. Retrieved 10 July 2019.
^ "Best Books of 2018: History". Financial Times. Financial Times. Retrieved 10 July 2019.
^ "GU Faculty 360". Georgetown University Faculty. Georgetown University. Retrieved 10 July 2019.
^ "When the World Was Cold: Five Questions for Dagomar Degroot". Undark Magazine. Linchpin Creative Agency. Retrieved 10 July 2019.
^ "Some societies flourished in the Little Ice Age. There are lessons for us now". Washington Post. Retrieved 10 July 2019.