Explanation:
In the early years of America’s Revolutionary War, which began
in 1775, it appeared likely that the British would crush the armies of
her colonial territory and incorporate it back into the empire. The
British troops were a well-trained and disciplined army that was feared
worldwide. In contrast, the American troops were newly trained,
sometimes poorly organized, and lacked sufficient resources to fight
effectively. General George Washington could have easily been defeated
in the Battle of Long Island on August 22, 1776. Historical records show
that Sir William Howe, the British commander, was clearly defeating
Washington on Long Island and was actually winning handily (Seymour,
1995). Nonetheless, the weather intervened when a heavy fog rolled in,
so the American forces were able to retreat, regroup, and survive to fightanother day. Because of this fog, the United States was not defeated in its
struggle for freedom. Consequently, today’s United Kingdom of England,
Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland does not include the United States.
The United States is not a commonwealth of a mother country, as Canada
and Australia are, though the United States still has strong ties to its
colonial past.
4 When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia in the early nineteenth
century, he met with early successes that appeared to guarantee that he
might eventually rule the world as his personal domain. His soldiers
captured Moscow and destroyed the city, which encouraged him to
push farther in his military campaigns. However, because of his dreams
of glory, Napoleon overlooked the simple fact that Russian winters are
extremely cold. When the temperatures fell below freezing, many of his
soldiers and their horses died in the brutal weather. As Belloc (1926)
writes in his classic study of the Napoleonic wars, “The cold was the
abominable thing: The dreadful enemy against which men could not
fight and which destroyed them” (p. 217). As a result of the failure of
Napoleon’s Russian campaigns, his own rule ended relatively soon after.
His defeat led to a reorganization of power throughout the European
nations, as well as to the rise of Russia as a major world power.
5 As these three examples unambiguously demonstrate, the
weather has caused numerous huge shifts in world history as well as in
power balances among cultures and nations. Without the rainy storms
of the monsoon season, Japan might be the eastern outpost of Mongolia;
without the appearance of dense fog, the United States might still be a
territory of the United Kingdom; and without winter snow, Muscovites
might speak French. Today weather forecasters can usually predict with a
high degree of accuracy when thunderstorms, hurricanes, tsunamis, and
tornadoes will strike, but the course of history cannot be fully isolated
from the effects of the weather.
