Historically Thinking

In 2003 East Carolina University named its college of liberal arts the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences. This was in part because Thomas Harriot had been deeply involved in the first English colony in North America, sited on Roanoke Island in modern North Carolina; and because as “an adventurer, anthropologist, astronomer, author, cartographer, ethnographer, explorer, geographer, historian, linguist, mathematician, naturalist, navigator, oceanographer, philosopher, planner, scientist, surveyor, versifier and teacher,” there was hardly an area of not only the ancient but the modern liberal arts into which Harriot did not at least glance. It is not going too far to say that wherever Thomas Harriot was, there was a college of arts and sciences.

Robyn Arianhrod is both a mathematician and a writer, the author a series of wonderful books that explain maths even to those of us who are still a little frightened of them, doing so in lucid prose. She is therefore uniquely qualified to write a new and complete biography of this amazing man. It's titled Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science, and comes out from Oxford University Press on May 1st.  It gives full attention to not only his involvement in the first English attempts to colonize the North America, but to his even more important mathematical and scientific achievements. The conversation is, hopefully, a fairly painless tour through the early modern revolution in mathematics and physics.

For Further Investigation

Roanoke Island–Fort Raleigh National Historic Site

Conversations with Richard Fidler: another podcast featuring Robyn Arianrhod speaking about her earlier book Seduced by Logic: Émilie Du Châtelet, Mary Somerville and the Newtonian Revolution

The Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University: a short introduction to the college's namesake and "Thomas Harriot Surfs the Web"

NCpedia: Thomas Harriot

The Galileo Project: Thomas Harriot

Kelly Dean Jolley is Goodwin-Philpott Endowed Chair in Religion and Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University.  His work is in the theory of judgment, philosophical psychology, metaphilosophy, the philosophy of religion, the history of twentieth century philosophy (analytical and phenomenological) and ancient philosophy. He also describes himself as “outside of philosophy,” he says, “I am a rank amateur poet, a reader of literature, a watcher of football, a smoker of pipes, and an admirer of american pit bull terriers.”

Note that "historian" is not one of the things on the list. But I've been wanting to talk to him since 2008, when I read a profile of  him in the New York Times Magazine. There, of all places, the author Jonathan Mahler chronicled Kelly's struggles to build not merely a philosophy department, but a community doing philosophy. It spoke to my heart in a direct and earnest way, mirroring many of my experiences, but also giving me hope. Ever since then I've wanted to hear Kelly describe his experiences in his own words, and to hear the story behind the story. That's the focus of today's conversation.

For Further Investigation

Quantum Est in Rebus Inane–the blog of Kelly Dean Jolly

Jonathan Mahler, "The Thinker", The New York Times, September 19, 2008

Episode 8: Why a Liberal Arts Degree is Not Career Suicide

The Perry Mason Head Tilt

The myths and stories of the ancient Greeks are filled with androids, robots, life-prolonging treatments, and similar imaginings of technology. The android Talos defended the island of Crete. Daedalus, his creator, also made other androids, or life-mimicking sculptures. The artisan god Hephaestus created not only the lighting bolts of Zeus, but was aided at his forge by automated devices. For the Greeks, the mythic past was inhabited by supergeniuses who could create marvelous things which even now seem futuristic.

Adrienne Mayor in her new book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology not only catalogs these creations, weaving together sources from Hesiod to Etruscan urns, but seeks to understand the fascination, even the obsession, that ancient people had for tales of the artificial creation of life and of the augmentation of natural powers. Adrienne Mayor is a research scholar in classics and the history of science at Stanford University. This is her sixth book, one of several that “investigates natural knowledge contained in pre-scientific myths and oral traditions.”

For Further Investigation

The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World

The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy

The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times

“The premise of my book,” writes Thomas F. Gieryn, “is that place matters mightily for what people believe to be true. We can better understand why some assertions or propositions or ideas become for some people credible and believable by locating them somewhere on the skin of the earth—and by asking what things are to be experienced at that spot and how this place is culturally understood.”

Gieryn, the Rudy Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Indiana University in Bloomington writes that in the introduction of his new book Truth Spots: How Places Make People Believe. It is a scholarly, provocative, and accessible book, as well as a sort of grand tour of places that help us believe things. He begins in the ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where once the prophetess spoke cryptic words to seekers of the future. From there he goes to other places, perhaps less obvious. Among others, there are Thoreau's retreat on the banks of Walden Pond; Henry Ford's ersatz village of Greenfield; the courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts; the road to Santiago de Compostela; and the pristine clean rooms in which leaded gasoline was determined to be environmentally harmful. All of these, Gieryn argues, are places which help those who visit them–or even so much as know of their existence–believe something. "Truth may well be the daughter of time, Gieryn argues, but it is also the son of place."

For Further Investigation

Delphi

Walden Pond State Park

The Henry Ford: Greenfield Village

Detroit Institute of Arts

Walking the Camino de Santiago

George Washington spent a considerable amount of his time during the American Revolution deploring his soldier’s uniforms. A man who liked to design uniforms, he found himself instead simply seeking for a supply of cloth with which to make hunting shirts—or leather from which to make shoes.

That, for Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s, is the origin point of the story she tells, in her new book Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776-1848. It was that military need for textiles—as well as the more obvious need for guns and ammunition that drove American industrial policy until the Civil War. The need to never rely once again on European imports in time of crisis led the new national government towards what she describes as a “de facto partnership” between government and industry.

For Further Investigation

Alexander Hamilton, "Report on the Subject of Manufactures"

Springfield Armory National Historic Site

Harper's Ferry National Historical Park

Lowell National Historical Park

Slater Mill Historic Site

The Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop

Samuel Colt

The Blanchard Lathe–one of the manufacturing innovations pioneered in the federal armories

Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it