Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National

Dowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert

Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory. The show that explains the history behind today's

headlines, I'm Nathan Connolly. I'm Brian Valla and I'm Ed Ayers. I know we're in

the dog days of summer right now, but imagine that it's the dead of winter.

And because this is backstory, let's go back to winter time in 18th century New

England. Uh-oh. It was unexpectedly and frighteningly cold, even to the indigenous

inhabitants. This is historian Joyce Chaplin. Winter as it approaches is just a

kind of horrible thing that haunts you, that you're not sure you can survive and

that kind of beats at you year after year after year. Chaplin says that an

early America, winters, were especially brutal. Boston Harbor freezes over in the

1740s. And for one winter, it's said that people can actually walk from some

of the outlying islands to Boston over parts of the ice that are thick enough.

This is just unthinkable now, of course.

Colonists were experiencing the effects of what we now call the little ice age.

This was a period of cooling, which lasted from the year 1300 until about 1850.

Winters were so long and harsh that some years were described as a year without

summer.

The cold really affects the earliest colonists who are completely unprepared,

and they had not expected that there would be many feet of snow that would last

...