Christmas 2022 will be long remembered for the savage winter storm that struck much of the United States.
Buffalo, New York, saw four feet of snow and deadly low temperatures. A friend in Minneapolis-St. Paul told me that the weather service there once cheerily reported that the temperature would climb to 6 degrees the following day. Cities and towns around the nation suffered power outages and broken water lines.
In Northeastern Pennsylvania, where I spent Christmas with my daughter and her family, the thermometer registered single digits for nearly three days. One morning, coming back into the house, I wondered about the temperatures in the winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge, which was less than two hours away. I searched online and found that the troops of George Washington had contended at times with weather nearly as frigid as our own….