Description: Historical weather and climate data have become essential resources for tracking and understanding global warming. All too often, however, these data sets are treated as inert and apolitical. In this column, Elaine LaFay shows that historical weather data reveal far more than a changing climate: they play a key role in American settler-colonialism in the context of U.S. expansion into the Gulf South. Winds and weather were understood as active participants in human health and as powerful instruments in settlers’ imagination of themselves and their world.