Time to Eat the Dogs
A Podcast About Science, History, and ExplorationReplay: Descartes, Traveler
Hal Cook talks about the travels and trials of the young Descartes, a man who spent as much time traveling and fighting as he did studying philosophy. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He is the author of The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War out this year with University of Chicago Press.
Harold Cook
African American Women and Jamaican Travel
Bianca C. Williams
Annette Joseph Gabrielle hosts Time to Eat the Dogs. She talks with Bianca C. Williams about African American women who travel to Jamaica as tourists looking for happiness, intimacy, and new identities free from the limits of American racism.
Annette Joseph-Gabriel
Joseph-Gabriel is an assistant professor of French at the University of Minnesota, College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Williams is an associate professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Transnationalism.
Replay: The Revolution in Paleoanthropology
Homo Naledi
John Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the challenge of rethinking anthropological science’s relationship with indigenous peoples and the general public. Hawks is the Vilas-Borghesi Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-author of Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story
John Hawks, (photo credit Russ Creech)
Links:
John Hawks blog
Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery that Changed the Human Story
Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans
Helen Rozwadowski talks about the history of the oceans and how these oceans have shaped human history in profound ways. Rozwadowski is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut Avery Point. She is the author of many books including Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (Reaktion Books, 2018).
Helen Rozwadowski
Replay: The Biggest Exploration Exam Ever (two episodes)
Doctoral candidate Sarah Pickman talks about studying exploration: specifically what it’s like to read three hundred books and articles and to be able to discuss them for hours in front of a committee of professors. This event, the preliminary or comprehensive exam, is the last step a graduate student takes before beginning her dissertation. Pickman also discusses recent trends in exploration literature and her top five list of exploration books.
If you like the discussion, you may also want to listen to the bonus episode where we give our top picks for some unconventional categories of books. Pickman also talks about the exam experience at Global Maritime History in her essays “Surviving the Qualifying Exam” (Part I)(Part II)
Texts discussed:
Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927
Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire
Nancy Shoemaker, Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race
Isaiah Lorado Wilner, “A Global Potlatch: Identifying the Indigenous Influence on Western Thought,” in American Indian Culture and Research Journal vol. 37, No. 2 (2013), pp. 87-114.
Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer
Sarah Pickman’s Top Five
Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters
Dane Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia
David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany
Lisa Messeri, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds
Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana
Sarah Pickman
The Biggest Exploration Exam Ever:
Bonus Episode: Exploration Books
Re-imagining People in Anthropological Photographs
Northcote Thomas’s anthropological photographs reworked by Chiadikobi Nwaubani
Chiadikobi Nwaubani talks about his efforts to find, restore, and publish photographs from the colonial archives of West Africa. He also talks about his work re-interpreting these photographs using art and photo-manipulation.
Momo Samura, Sierra Leone, 1914. Described as ‘Susu Boy’ in Northcote Thomas’s Anthropological Report on Sierra Leone (1916)
“Susu Boy,” by Chiadikobi Nwaubani, 2018.
Mooku, a Nigerian girl from Mgbakwu (1911). Colorized by Chiadikobi Nwaubani from an original photograph by Northcote Thomas.
Nwaubani has created an online historical archive of photographs called Ụ́kpụ́rụ́. He has also contributed to the [Re]entanglements project which retraces and reinterprets the journeys of British anthropologist Northcote Thomas during his surveys of Nigeria and Sierra Leone in the early 1900s.
Chiadikobi Nwaubani
Replay: Project Vanguard
Vanguard team prepares satellite for lauch (1958)
Dr. Angelina Callahan talks about the Naval Research Laboratory’s Vanguard Project. While the launch of Vanguard 1 in 1958 was part of the Cold War “Space Race,” it also represented something more: a scientific platform for understanding the space environment as well as a test vehicle that would provide data for satellites of the future. Vanguard 1 is still flying. At 60 years, it is the oldest artificial satellite in space.
Callahan is the Naval Research Laboratory Historian. She is also a co-author (with John Krige and Ashok Mahara) of NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space. Her work has also been featured in NASA Spaceflight: A History of Innovation, the Navy War College Review, Seapower Magazine, and Federal News Radio.
Angelina Callahan
Links:
NRL Celebrates Sixty Years in Space with Vanguard
J. Krige, A. Maharaj, and A. Callahan, NASA in the World
Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space
Angelina Callahan, “The Origins and Flagship Project of NASA’s International Program: The Ariel Case Study” in NASA Spaceflight: A History of Innovation
Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
David H. DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the US Space Sciences after World War II
