Introduction: About American Weather

The introduction surveys the book's arguments and reviews relevant literature in the fields of environmental history, Indigenous environmental studies, and science and technology studies. It addresses why weather-dependent settler colonialism is a vital area of study and explains how and why the book rescripts settler environmental data collection as part of the larger project of settler colonialism in the US settler states. In profiling each of the book's chapters, the introduction puts forward the argument that data gathering and quantification gave coherence to a national weather project and to a notion—grounded in settler and heteropatriarchal values—of “nation” itself.