Peter N. Miller’s “‘The History of Rain and Fine Weather’ Revisited: The View from the Top of the Gianicolo” kicked off the new fellowship year at the American Academy in Rome. AAR Director Aliza Wong welcomed the attendees to a full lecture room comprising the new cohort of Rome Prize Fellows along with staff, trustees, and friends.
Miller’s presentation explored weather, not just as a backdrop to human history but as an active agent shaping it and, most provocatively, as history itself. The story of weather-as-history, he argued, got its most popular presentation in the daily weather maps that occupied their modest places in newspapers around the world in the century and a half from 1850 or so, onward. These images, closer to technical diagrams than works of art, brought to people around the world a lesson in thinking like historians: actors making change over time. Only in this case, the actors were forces like temperature, wind, rain and, at the center of his talk, pressure.
Miller noted, in passing, the way so many of the central themes in the history of historical research were germane here, such as the role of prediction and the relationship of the microscale (i.e., individuals) to the macroscale (as seen in economies, societies, civilizations). And also how present the issues raised by weather were to significant writers and thinkers such as Goethe, Thoreau, Musil, and Proust, not to mention artists from John Constable to Paterson Ewen.
At the end of his talk Miller enumerate initiatives focusing on environment and climate, in particular the launch of a new, pilot collaborative Rome Prize for Environmental Arts and Humanities, included in this year’s competition. The deadline is November 1, 2024.