Time To Eat The Dogs

Babak Ashrafi and Jessica Linker talk to me about my book The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent. Ashrafi and Linker produced this interview for the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. You can find many podcasts, video lectures, and other materials at the Consortium website CHSTM.org. Thanks to Tyler Putman, Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi, and Nicholas Barron for contributing questions to the interview.

Glen Asner and Stephen Garber talk about NASA’s efforts to plan ambitious missions in the face of huge political and financial challenges. Asner is the Deputy Chief Historian for the Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). Garber works in the NASA History Division at NASA Headquarters. They are the authors of Origins of 21st-Century Space Travel: A History of NASA’s Decadal Planning Team and the Vision for Space Exploration, 1999–2004.

Antony Adler talks about the history of ocean science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Adler is a Research Associate in the History Department at Carleton College. He’s the author of Neptune’s Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea.

Tina Adcock talks about the controversy over George Putnam's Baffin Land expedition and why it tells a bigger story about the changing culture of exploration in the 1920s. Adcock is an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She’s the author of the essay “Scientist Tourist Sportsman Spy: Boundary-Work and the Putnam Eastern Arctic Expeditions” which was published in the edited collection Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History, edited by Adcock and Edward Jones-Imhotep.

Benjamin Hopkins talks about the concept of the frontier: how it exists not merely as a place on a map but as a set of practices used by colonial states around the world. Hopkins is an associate professor of history at George Washington University. He’s the author of Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State.

Claire Isabel Webb talks about the search for extraterrestrial life and the different strategies used by astronomers and exobiologists to look for it. Webb is a PhD candidate at MIT's History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society Program. Her dissertation project, “Technologies of Perception: The Search for Life and Intelligence Beyond Earth” won the HSS/NASA Fellowship in Aerospace History.

Al Zambone talks with me about American polar exploration, the origin of Time to Eat the Dogs, and the history of science as an academic discipline. Zambone is the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. He’s the author of Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life. You can hear an extended version of this interview on the Historically Thinking podcast, available on most podcast platforms as well as online at historicallythinking.org.

Lukas Rieppel talks about dinosaur fossils in the Gilded Age  – from the discovery and excavation of fossils in the American West to the re-construction of fabulous creatures in museums that were the darlings of wealthy philanthropists. Rieppel is an assistant professor of history at Brown University. He’s the author of Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel speaks to Jessica Nabongo about her quest to be the first black woman to travel to all of the countries of the world. Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Nabongo is a writer, entrepreneur, and the founder of Jet Black, a boutique luxury travel company that promotes tourism to Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

Lisa Ruth Rand talks about the Starlink satellite program. She also talks about Project West Ford, which attempted to create an artificial ionosphere in 1961 by launching millions of copper needles into orbit. Rand is the Haas Postdoctoral Fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Her op-ed on Starlink and Project West Ford appeared in the July 8th 2019 edition of Scientific American.

Lachlan Fleetwood talks about debates about altitude sickness in the Himalaya and the ways these debates became tied up with ideas about the physiology of Europeans and Himalayans in the 1800s. Fleetwood is the author of “Bodies in High Places: Exploration, Altitude Sickness, and the Problem of Bodily Comparison in the Himalaya, 1800-50,” published in the journal Itinerario 43, no. 3 (2019): 489-515.

Fiona Vernal talks about the migration stories of Hartford Connecticut’s many communities. Vernal is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut and the creator of the exhibition “From Human Rights to Civil Rights: African American, Puerto Rican, and West Indian Housing Struggles in Hartford County Connecticut, 1940-2019” now open at the Hartford Public Library.

Kate Hollander talks about Bertolt Brecht’s life and work. She also talks about the community of artists who were his friends, lovers, and collaborators. Hollander is a historian of modern Europe. She’s also the author of a book of poems, My German Dictionary, which was awarded the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize by USA Poet Laureate Charles Wright.

David Woodman talks about his quest to find the missing wrecks of the Franklin Expedition, a mission that led him to the journals of the Arctic explorer Charles Hall who lived with the Inuit for four years and recorded their encounters with British explorers. Woodman is the author of Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony, a book that correctly predicted the site of HMS Erebus discovered by Parks Canada in 2014.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel talks about black women writers, decolonization, and travel. Joseph-Gabriel is an assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She’s the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire.

Sarah Qidwai talks about her research on Sayyid Ahmad Khan as well as her own journey to Mecca and Medina. Qidwai is a Ph.D candidate in the History of Science at the University of Toronto. Her essay “Reexamining Complexity: Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Interpretation of 'Science' in Islam” is in the edited collection Rethinking History, Science and Religion: Exploring Complexity published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Richard Read talks about the troubled life of the Coast Guard's sole heavy icebreaker, Polar Star. Read is the Bureau Chief of the Los Angeles Times in Seattle. He is the winner of two Pulitzer prizes for his investigations on the Asian Financial Crisis and abuses by U.S. immigration officials. His article on the Polar Star was published in the August 2nd edition of the Los Angeles Times.

Elizabeth Leane talks about Sidney Jeffryes, radio operator for Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition in 1913. Jeffryes’ struggle with mental illness challenged Mawson’s expedition party as well as the way Mawson tried to present his expedition to audiences back home. Leane is a professor of English at the University of Tasmania and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She’s also the co-author (along with Ben Maddison and Kimberley Norris) of “Beyond the Heroic Stereotype: Sidney Jeffryes and the Mythologising of Australian Antarctic History.”

Bathsheba Demuth talks about the history and exploration of the Bering Strait, from the early 1800s to the present day. Demuth is Assistant Professor of History & Environment and Society at Brown University. She’s the author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait.

Jordan Bimm talks about early experiments in space medicine involving subjects who did not resemble the white male test pilots who would become America's first astronauts. Bimm is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. He’s the author of Anticipating the Astronaut which is under contract to MIT Press, expected in Spring 2021.