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Today we travel into the not so distant past to learn a little about something called the little ice age and its effect on society. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook.

The "little ice age" at first sounds like one of those oxymorons, like hot water heater or jumbo shrimp -- what could possibly be little about an ice age? Well, this ice age, which occured between about 1450 and 1850, did not have all the trappings of a real ice age -- no glaciers, or woolly mammoths or shrinking oceans, just a few centuries of cold weather. Things were pretty busy in North America during the time of the little ice age. The colonies were settled, the US became a country, and expanded from sea to shining sea. All this before the weather warmed up. So the colder than average weather, which colonists thought was average, turned out to shape many social behaviors.

Winters in the Northeast were especially brutal -- they're not exactly a piece of cake these days either -- but back then the challenge of surviving on the cold land led to what some may call Yankee ingenuity or resourcefulness. People had to invent ways to keep warm. One way was to share body heat, which at times raised a few Yankee eyebrows. It was not uncommon for young women to have their sweet hearts over for dinner to meet the family and then with the blessing of the parents scurry off for a night of "sharing body heat" under the covers. This practice was called bundling and it was a social issue of much discussion amid the puritanical values of the day. However, in the face of a little ice age, what's a little bundling among friends.

The Weather Notebook is produced by the Mount Washington Observatory. The show is underwritten by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive and funded by The National Science Foundation.