Shall we play a word-association game? I’ll say “Darwin.” And chances are, you’ll say “Origin of Species,” or “Evolution,” or “Biology.” Charles Darwin laid the foundation for modern biology. He changed our whole conception of how species come to be, why a single simple organism could be the root of a riotously-branching tree, how “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” Of course we associate him with biology. Rightly so.
But »
Newspapers, magazines, blogs and Twitter are awash with anniversaries. Today’s Birthdays, On this Day in History, #OTD and so on greet me every morning. I know a handful of famous people or events that share my birthday, and I am usually aware of forthcoming anniversaries for the people or institutions that I study. It cannot have escaped your attention that this year sees a Dickens anniversary and a royal jubilee. But why should it be in any way meaningful?
There is, of course, a meaningful hi… »
We’ve scoured the Letters of Note archives once again, this time for notes from men who would hold or were holding the highest office in the land. Here are ten of our favorite letters from the presidents. (There’s a Letters of Note book in the works — learn more and preorder a copy here.)
1. “Liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”
General Eisenhower’s Order of the Day on June 5, 1944, was a call-to-arms for members of the allied forces before they would begin a two-pronged assault un… »
I. The new USIH blogger LD Burnett has a post up expressing ambivalence about the digital humanities because it is too eager to reject books. This is a pretty common argument, I think, familiar to me in less eloquent forms from New York Times comment threads. It’s a rhetorically appealing position–to set oneself up as a defender of the book against the philistines who not only refuse to read it themselves, but want to take your books away and destroy them. I worry there’s some mystification in… »
“On the frontispiece a picture of a monkey’s head had been pasted in the middle of a rose.”
“On the front, where there should be pictures of eminent persons, there are the faces of cats and a bird has been pasted where the face of an eminent person should be.”
“In a book on the life of Dame Sybil Thorndike there was a photograph of her sitting in a chair in a room, but the picture of a man’s torso had been pasted in front of her face to show her looking at the man.”
Such were the dry descriptio… »
It’s Monday, so let’s run last night’s episode of Downton Abbey through the anachronism machine. I looked for Downton Abbey anachronisms for the first time last week: using the Google Ngram dataset, I can check every two-word phrase in an episode to see if it’s more common today than then. This 1) lets us find completely anachronistic phrases, which is fun; and 2) lets us see how the language has evolved, and what shows do the best job at it. [Since some people care about this–don’t worry, no … »
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@TimHitchcock: Text-mining Downton Abbey anachronisms, costume showdown edition. (Howler of the day: "novelty value"). http://t.co/T349dnt0
West Wycombe is a charming village in the midst of the rolling hills of Buckinghamshire. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce saved many of its buildings from imminent destruction in 1929, purchasing it in March of that year. Successfully breathing new life into the village, The Times claimed in 1934 that revenue from the village had jumped.[1] In 1933, the society turned over the property to the National Trust, which extended its holdings in the followi… »
Timothy Messer-Kruse’s wrote an excellent Chronicle column on Wikipedia last week. (Word to the wise: The comments section has devolved into nonsense at times, so read at your own peril.)It r…
Digital History 31 May 2011 Professor Richard Rodger (Edinburgh) Space, place and the city: a simple anti-GIS approach for historians
William EDGAR- City and Castle of Edinburgh 1765
If you suggest using GIS (geographical information system) to an historian they might look back at you blankly or with a look of mild horror on their face. For many historians GIS is viewed (not unfairly) as a complicated tool best left to others. However, its potential usefulness in answering and revealing… »
Challenged to think of a female scientist in the Georgian era I struggled to get beyond Caroline Herschel, about whom I have already blogged. Checking through the inventory of female scientists is a depressingly short list, partly because educational opportunities for women were so limited, and also because the higher echelons of acadaemia were firmly barred. But it turns out that there was an exception – not in England, but in Bologna where the university can claim to be the oldest in Europe, … »
By Pamela Toler
Image courtesy of the Walters Art Museum
The Islamic world created illuminated manuscripts that rivaled anything that came out of a medieval monastery: Qu’rans, historical chronicles, stories of the prophets, the deeds of kings, lyric poetry, heroic epics, philosophy, scientific treatises, and romantic tales.
Caliphs, courtiers, and wealthy merchants commissioned manuscripts from the ninth century until well into the seventeenth century, when the Islamic world reluctantly acce… »
Dining was a very, very big deal in Edwardian England — and the food, it turns out, was pretty sophisticated. So why was British food derided as boring, tasteless fare for much of the 20th century? Here’s the story.
Punch, or the London Charivari is a wonderful source for history of science. It is impossible to think of a popular magazine today including jokes that span politics, science, the arts, classical r…
When ever I think of Mary “Bloody” Tudor, I think of the opening line to that Philip Larkin poem This Be The Verse:
They f*ck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
By why I hear you cry, well I feel that Queen Mary I, Tudor and heir of Henry VIII, was the Queen she was, due in part… »
I posted this on Google+ earlier, but it seemed worthwhile to expand it into a blog post.
Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788-1827) is, in my opinion, one of the underappreciated giants in optical physics. Though Thomas Young’s double slit experiment was the first one to demonstrate the wave nature of light, it was the later efforts of Fresnel that put the wave properties of light on firm theoretical footing and really popularized the idea.
The famous and important part of Fresnel’s life involves the … »
What a charred ancient tree can teach us about impermanence, deep time, and our place in the universe.
The tree had been on fire for over a week before anyone noticed. The Senator, one of the oldest Cypress trees in the world, was killed when a smoldering ignition from an errant lightning strike slowly transformed it into a towering chimney and fuel source in one. Or maybe it didn’t happen like that at all. Perhaps it was an errant cigarette, or a sinister match strategically placed in its holl… »
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@ptak: If you missed it ☞ What the mysterious death of a 3,500-year-old tree can teach us about impermanence and deep time http://t.co/32ztyUFb
[Part 6 of 6 -- A short version of this series was published at DAWN - Books & Authors]
That three million perished in the 1971 conflict is widely stated around the world. Salil Tripathi points out that “Killing three million people over 267 days amounts to nearly 11,000 deaths a day. That would make it one of the most lethal conflicts of all time.” Is that so? Numerous scholars have concluded that the figure of three million is exaggerated and incorrect. Sarmila Bose contends that “it is possi… »
The last month has delivered up a bumper crop of history of science posts throughout the Internet and they are present here with no system and no order. This is the history of science Grand Bazaar. Just let your mouse cursor wander down the screen and click on a link and see which histsci morsel fate delivers for your delectation.
The BBC rediscovers Darwin’s lost fossils
Deborah Blum at Berfois offers us Dorothy L Sayers’ historical use of the Marsh test in her detective novels.
Jeff Suzuki se… »
‘Series Imaginum Augustae Domus Boicae, ad Genuina Ectypa Aliaque Monum Fide Digna delin. et Aaeri Incidit, Monachium’ 1773 by Joseph Anton Zimmerman, is online at the Bavarian State Library in Munich – ‘Miniaturansicht’ for thumbnail pages. The book is (fairly obviously) a genealogical portrait record of Bavarian nobility (or royal lineage) from about the 10th century onwards. Bavarian history being the convoluted assembly of ruling houses that it is, I’m not altogether sure what ‘Domus Boica… »
Music could have had a big influence on the design of Stonehenge, according to an American researcher reporting at an annual science meeting in Canada.
I imagine that this will be a recurring theme for a while – I had thought that one single post would address it sufficiently…until the discussion about reenacting and living history blossomed (well, maybe that’s a tad hyperbolic … but it did get some discussion). The notion of what I like to call “history as everyman discipline” came up, and I think it merits some discussion. Plus I’d like to hear what you think, in particular about a very elementary (and deceptively simple) question:
What, pre… »
In the small hours this date* in 1907, Venezuelan Gen. Antonio Paredes was summarily shot for an abortive rising against dictator Cipriano Castro.
The Andean military governor Castro had overthrown the previous kleptocracy in the Restoration Revolution of 1899.
Castro’s state was racked by internal conflicts as Castro’s body was by collapsing organ systems. Both factors helped encourage malcontents towards designs upon his job.
Paredes was one of the regime’s chief opponents, an admired officer »
Anybody who enters into even a casual discussion with a US citizen about their country’s constitution will be struck by the ease with which they reference names, dates and significant events in the cr
A new wave of writers are modelling their state-of-the-nation novels on the model pioneered by a great Victorian
With all the current noise about Dickens, it would be easy to miss the fact that another Victorian is casting his shadow over today’s literary landscape. Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now remains the supreme example of the state of the nation novel, a sprawling tour de force with a huge cast of characters and a labyrinthine plot. The shifting viewpoints, keen engagement with con… »
In my Atlantic World module, we spend several weeks discussing various migration types, including exploration, sojourning, and settlement. Although writing lectures for these topics was simple enough, constructing seminars proved far more difficult. Should my students work through case studies or discuss the groupings more broadly? The former meant privileging one sort of sojourner over another, and the latter ran the risk of gross oversimplification. My solution? A Choose-their-own-Adventure g… »
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Galehaut Arranged Lancelot and Guinevere’ First Kiss Manuscript illustration, c 1400 Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris Author’s note: Lancelot has a fetching leg… And so, the story goes…Guinevere wanted to meet the knight, who saved her husband King Arthur’s kingdom. She persuaded Galehaut to arrange a meeting between her & the unknown Black Knight. Galehaut left them alone, so that they could talk; & he joined a group of ladies that Guinevere had brought along. One of the ladies was t… »
Ithaka S+R is pleased to release this Interim Report of the Research Support Services for Scholars History Project, summarizing our interviews with research support professionals who support the field of history. We hope to engage the community – librarians, archivists, research support professionals, historians, digital historians, and funders alike – in discussions about the RSS4S History Project findings. Please share your thoughts and experiences with us. We welcome reactions and feedback … »
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@uohistlib: What innovative history scholarship is happening on your campus? Join the conversation about our History Project http://t.co/683CtaIs#RSS4S
We may think of the Victorian age as a politer time, when greetings cards featured sweet children, cute kittens, lacy borders and the language of flowers. ‘Vinegar valentines’, with their crude caricatures and cruel ‘humour’, tell a different story.
These cards appeared in the mid-nineteenth century and were generally cheap and poorly printed, although the mechanical example above, posted on Valentine’s Day 1859, is a little more elaborate. Its verse is typical:
Although you do dress rath… »
”Fraudulent’ disability in historical perspective’, by David M. Turner, an article from History & Policy, the independent initiative working for better public policy through an understanding of history
Over the last several years, I have been studying a variety of eighteenth-century gentleman’s societies. They have ranged from the ostensibly scientific and rational – such as the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries – to the intellectual, but hedonistic – for example the Divan Club and the Society of Dilettanti – to the secret – including The Monks of Medmenham Abbey, more popularly known as the Hellfire Club.
One of the things that makes the Monks of Medmenham Abbey so interesting is… »
Nanoscale poetry, electrifying kisses and telegraphic love waves – just some of the ways scientists reveal their romantic side
A scientist is perhaps not the first person you’d go to for dating advice. That’s a stereotype, sure, but it isn’t helped by the likes of Nikola Tesla, who allegedly ran in terror from the first – and only – kiss of his life.
Even the legendarily beautiful Hypatia, mathematician of ancient Alexandria and head of its great library, was distinctly uninterested in romance…. »
Beatrice Webb, co-founder of both the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Fabian movement, left a fascinating 70-year account of social upheaval and history in the diaries which have now been made freely available online to launch LSE’s digital library. UCLDH collaborated with this project since its early stages: Julianne Nyhan served on [...]
Screenshot from Eons Timeline Timeline Eons promises nothing if not the whole world. The app presents the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang to our present 21st-century travails, scaled down into a graphical representation on your phone or tablet’s relatively compact screen.
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@Ajprescott: All of recorded history, from the Big Bang to the present day, in one ambitious, if flawed, mobile app: http://t.co/sODf1YDa
On his first visit to America in 1842, English novelist Charles Dickens was greeted like a modern rock star. But the trip soon turned sour, as Simon Watts reports.
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@kalsnats: Dickens on Americans: "He began to find them overbearing, boastful, vulgar… insensitive and above all acquisitive." http://t.co/UsaJ0CVy
On 14 February 1646 — towards the end of the civil war — the London weekly newspaper The True Informer published the following editorial:
Episcopacy being abolished,* I see no reason why this day in which this book is extant, should be honoured in the commemoration of Bishop Valentine, or by what anomalous power of the Church of Rome, he should be made the Patron of copulation; there is no doubt but he was a Bishop, & I am afraid a very wanton one, for otherwise why should that lusty heat which… »
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@SFD85: An anti-prelatical anti-valentine: Joad Raymond blogs about Valentine’s Day in the news in 1646.
http://t.co/LPnsqsAK
Over at Darren Reid’s blog, Mark Cheathem has some interesting things to say about the concept of the ‘Age of Jackson’. In particular, he notes that his students in Tennessee look at the 1820s and …
The late Georgian press (1783-1837) had a strange relationship with New South Wales. In sharp contrast to descriptions of British North America, descriptions of the southern settlement tended to concentrate on the exotic rather than the mundane, the fantastic rather than the practical. Whereas news of Montreal might illuminate readers on prevailing market prices or seasonal weather trends–vital information to those considering emigration–discussions of New South Wales were focused primarily … »
Digital humanists like to talk about what insights about the past big data can bring. So in that spirit, let me talk about Downton Abbey for a minute. The show’s popularity has led many nitpickers to draft up lists of mistakes. Language Loggers Mark Liberman and Ben Zimmer have looked at some idioms that don’t belong for Language Log, NPR and the Boston Globe.) In the best British tradition, the Daily Mail even managed to cast the errors as a sort of scandal. But all of these have relied, so far »
In England in the late 19th century, death was a highly ritualized affair. Wives were expected to wear special dresses — black, conservative, often accessorized with "weeping veils" — for up to four years following the death of their husbands; if you’d lost a sister or brother, six months of mourning garb was the norm. "Full mourning" (lasting for a year and a day after the death), "second mourning" (the nine months after that), and "half mourning" (the three-six months after that) weren’t su… »
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@tcarmody: Here’s an incredibly thoughtful tech blog post with a great grasp of history & data, but NO, MORE SV STARTUP NEWS PLZ http://t.co/CLWZOY82
By Beth Dunn
Lovers have been carving their initials into tree trunks and fenceposts since time immemorial. It seems like if you’re in love, you’re a fool if you don’t carry a pocket knife at all times, just so that you can proclaim your passion to the world.
Maybe this is why the biggest bed in Christendom is simply riddled with graffiti.
I mean, maybe folks just like carving their names in stuff. But I bet there’s more to it than that.
The Great Bed of Ware has been a tourist attraction for a… »
Elizabeth Kessler spoke recently at Bryn Mawr College on how different artists have used astronomical photographs. It raised some interesting questions about how artifacts are created and then how they are used when removed from their initial context.
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@41un: RT @dhayton Belated summary of E. Kessler’s talk on “Retaking the Universe: Appropriation and Astronomical Artifacts” http://t.co/7zj6gvJQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgfhm1XOdYk
“A suffragette procession in Trafalgar Square led by Sylvia Pankhurst results in a riot in Whitehall. Policemen are seen escorting Miss Pankhurst away.”
- BFI Films
…
Thank you to BFI Films
@katrinagulliver: The AHA, with support from from Lumina Foundation, is initiating a nationwide project to “tune the history major” http://t.co/R0DH3ouc
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1728
This fine cartoon appeared in the 23 September 1865 issue (page 114) of the London Punch magazine, poking a little fun at the recent meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which had just finished its 35th meeting in Birmingham. Its attendees and contributors read like a "who’s who" of the heights of mid-19th century British sciences (across fields of geology, physics, physiology, chemistry, mathematics, statistics (and economics)): »
On Tuesday, the Clement Railroad Hotel and Museum in Dickson, Tennessee begins selling tickets to what is described as a "Public Paranormal Investigation." According to Volunteer State Paranormal Research:
The Hotel Halbrook is located in historic downtown Dickson, TN. The hotel was constructed in 1913 and is one of the few remaining examples of a railroad hotel in a small Tennessee town. The Museum features exhibits and programming involving the Civil War, railroading, and local and regional »
My first thought when I saw the painting is that it must surely be a portrait of Catherine Howard, the unfortunate fifth wife of Henry VIII. It is listed in the collections of the Met Museum, New Y…
The OED, s.v. ‘origin’, describes this as
the act or fact of beginning, or of springing from something; beginning of existence with reference to source or cause; rise or first manifestation Under this same entry, 1b., the citations include the following from 1867: J. McCosh Method Divine Govt. (ed. 9) iii. ii. 377, ‘The origin of evil, like every other beginning, shrouds itself in darkness’. Perhaps this ‘darkness’ about the origin of everything is most apt to discussions of textual genesis.See… »
Italian panel depicting Charles Darwin, created ca. 1890, on display at the Turin Museum of Human Anatomy. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
By Karl S. Rosengren, Sarah K. Brem, E. Margaret Evans and Gale M. Sinatra
Today is Darwin’s birthday. It’s doubtful that any scientist would deny Darwin’s importance, that his work provides the field of biology with its core structure, by providing a beautiful, powerful mechanism to explain the diversity of form and function that we see all around us in the liv… »
British History in the Long 18th Century 22 June 2011 Bob Harris (Worcester College, Oxford) Scottish townscapes and ‘improvement’ in the age of enlightenment c. 1720-1820
Castle Street, Dundee (19th century)
Did the enlightenment reach provincial Scottish towns in the Georgian period? What, if any, influence did it have on urban improvement, development and transformation of urban landscapes, particularly in the period between 1720 and 1820? Bob Harris tells us that there was uneven change… »
Although I understand their motives for doing so, as a historian of science, I am very sceptical of peoples’ attempts to make an institution out of the so-called Darwin Day. In my opinion this only serves to strengthen, propagate and support the big names and big events view of the history of science, which is for me an anathema. What I see is people saying that Darwin is the be all and end all of biology.
Biology as a discipline has a long and complex history stretching back way before Aristot… »
Just as social media is helping to ignite and organize the Arab Spring, printed newspapers fanned the flames of rebellion in colonial America, provided critical correspondence during the Revolutionary War.
A chronology of one of our most inescapable metaphors, or what Macbeth has to do with Galileo.
I was recently asked to select my all-time favorite books for the lovely Ideal Bookshelf project by The Paris Review’s Thessaly la Force. Despite the near-impossible task of shrinking my boundless bibliophilia to a modest list of dozen or so titles, I was eventually able to do it, and the selection included Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton — amo… »
The father of evolutionary theory was born on this day in 1809. Karen James dreams of toasting his birthday on a new Beagle
In 1819, he might have spent the day memorising Homer at boarding school. As it was a Friday, he would have rushed home at the end of the day, eager to assist his brother in their garden shed chemistry laboratory.
A few years later, the day might have been marred by the fresh memory of a lecture from his father. "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching," … »
Is there such a thing as ‘really bad books’ – e.g. the author picks upon The Da Vinci Code as an example of bad history which is so powerful that many people think that this is ‘how it is’: The world is full of “bad books”; not just uninteresting, or ill-informed, or morally repugnant books, [...]
We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization. Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbanization observed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to our most conservative estimates, the intro… »
Minor discoveries of gold were made in Australia in the early days, but it was the Californian goldrush of 1849 which sharpened interest. A tough brash mountain of a man named Edward Hammond Hargraves