Adelaide Mandeville’s dissertation "Changes in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of Weather Control in the Twentieth-Century United States" is a striking and imaginative account of twentieth-century American efforts to master the atmosphere. From its opening pages, the dissertation announces its narrative power: it begins with a meteorologist who published a book “right before he disappeared,” a line that immediately pulls the reader into a story that is as much about human ambition and uncertainty as it is about science. That sense of narrative control never falters. Drawing on an extraordinary archive—newspapers and popular media, government and corporate records, scientific reports, legal proceedings, and personal papers—Mandeville reconstructs a world in which the weather became an object of ambition, anxiety, and experiment.
Her central argument is both elegant and unsettling: weather control marked the high point of modern faith in the human capacity to dominate nature, but also revealed the limits of that ambition. Americans sought to rationalize, militarize, and commodify the skies, yet control remained elusive and deeply contested. What endures instead is a more troubling reality—while people failed to control the weather, they had already begun to alter the climate itself.
What distinguishes this dissertation, however, is not only its analytical force but its storytelling. Mandeville has a remarkable gift for finding telling vignettes that animate a vast and complex history: a man racing to deliver a valise full of lawsuits from Catskills residents fearful of cloud-seeding rains; a “rainmaker” appearing on national television, his profession so recognizable that it is quickly guessed by a game-show panel. These moments, drawn from sources like The New York Times and mid-century broadcast culture, reveal how deeply weather control entered everyday life and public imagination. Moving with ease from anthropological insights about ritual and belief to the work of Mary Douglas on order and classification, and to Bruno Latour’s reflections on modernity and the unstable boundary between nature and society, Mandeville situates these efforts within a broader intellectual history of how humans have sought to make nature legible—and governable. The result is a work of impressive range and originality, at once deeply researched and compellingly written, that reshapes our understanding of environmental history, the history of science, and the enduring problem of human attempts to control the natural world.
Adelaide Mandeville is an interdisciplinary U.S. historian who received her PhD in American Studies at Harvard and is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California.