One of my favorite blogs is N.C. Miscellany on the website of the North Carolina Collection at UNC Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library. You never know what you’ll find there, but in the hot weather lately there’s all sorts of interesting trivia, including how residents of Tarboro once had access to what was thought to be the country’s only refrigerated pool – the cool pool, they called it.
My friend and colleague Lew Powell points out another curiosity – a 1776 treatise on Southern heat. It was written by Dr. Lionel Chalmers and entitled, “An Account of the Weather and Diseases of South Carolina,” now a part of the Bruce Cotten Collection here at the NCC.
Among other things, Chalmers explains how heat affects us: “As the air becomes more moist from heat, the watery particles that float therein, enter our bodies along with the fiery ones: and these rendering each other more active are quickly conveyed throughout the system, weakening the solids and resolving the fluids still more.”
Well, that pretty much explains everything.
Here’s a link(fifth item down).
Monday, August 20, 2007
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2 comments:
From the tables in the article about the Summer of 1776, it looks as if they experienced moderately warm temperatures--not so hot that the Colonials were uncomfortable in their frontier garb but probably a bit toasty for our future good friends, the Brits, in those redcoats and such.
It is perhaps instructive that 13 years later in the Summer of 1789 when the Founders were drafting the new U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia, they often took recesses from official sessions to "adjourn to a nearby tavern."
Whether these excursions for liquid fortifications were due to the weather or just the general spirit of constitutional fervor prevailing at the time is something that the historians at Penn and the history buffs at The Philadelphia Inquirer will have to tell us.
It's a good thing that in the year prior to 1776, the Meck Deckers staged their local independence events on the 19th and 20th of May of that eventful year of 1775. The weather must have been pretty nice since Ephraim Brevard, John McKnitt Alexander and all the rest were able to make it to Trade and Tryon without having to take a couple days off for recuperation.
It is the last chaos gold which make me very happy these days, my brother says lastchaos gold is his favorite games gold he likes, he usually buy some lastchaos money to start his game and most of the time he will win the buy last chaos gold back and give me some cheap lastchaos gold to play the game.
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