scholarly journals History of the Teaching of Astronomy in American High Schools

1990 ◽  
Vol 105 ◽  
pp. 249-253
Author(s):  
Darrel B. Hoff
Keyword(s):  
Physical Geography ◽  
Practical Skills ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Early American ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Schools ◽  
Phases Of The Moon ◽  
Practical Nature

Early American colonists had a deep interest in astronomy. Between 1725 and 1764, Nathaniel Ames published the Astronomical Diary and Almanac at Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was a brief, widely-circulated source of astronomical information. It averaged an amazing 60,000 sales per year, while the better known Poor Richard’s Almanac distributed only about 10,000 per year (Noble, 1970).Practical skills were the dominant theme in early colonial schools. The astronomy that was taught dealt with natural phenomena such as phases of the moon, eclipses, and, for practical purposes, navigation and time-keeping. Astronomy was also frequently taught as a part of what we today would call physical geography courses. This practical nature of our culture dominated American schools until about the middle of the 1800’s. Astronomy, as a separate subject, did appear in the curriculum of academies — forerunners of the modern American high school. A popular textbook of this period, An Easy Introduction to Astronomy For Young Gentlemen and Ladies, by James Ferguson, dated 1817, illustrates this point. It is almost completely devoted to the explanation of natural phenomena (Ferguson, 1817). It is a charming book, taught in classic dialogue form between the teacher and his students.

scholarly journals In search of lost time: Javanese and Balinese understandings of the Indic calendar

2008 ◽  
Vol 163 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Proudfoot
Keyword(s):  
The Moon ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Phases Of The Moon

The history of calendars is best approached as a technical subject that has cultural and political dimensions. The functions of calendars – to enumerate days, months and years – can be achieved in a variety of ways. In broad terms Muslims expect their calendars to predict the phases of the moon, Christians expect their calendars to match the seasons of the year, and Hindus and Chinese expect their calendars to do both. These expectations can be met by different technical means, so that even among those who subscribe to a common set of expectations, there are invariably differences in the working calendars.

How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Catherine Cumming
Keyword(s):  
Financial Institutions ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Financial Instruments ◽  
Financial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of

This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counter-futures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anti-capitalist politics today.  

White Zombie as Captivity Narrative and the Death of Certainty

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Mark C Anderson
Keyword(s):  
American Indians ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Early American ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Black ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Society ◽  
Black Other

Horror films such as White Zombie (1932) reveal viewers to themselves by narrating in the currency of audience anxiety. Such movies evoke fright because they recapitulate fear and trauma that audiences have already internalized or continue to experience, even if they are not aware of it. White Zombie’s particular tack conjures up an updated captivity narrative wherein a virginal white damsel is abducted by a savage Other. The shell of the captivity story, of course, is as old as America. In its earliest incarnation it featured American Indians in the role as savage Other, fiendishly imagined as having been desperate to get their clutches on white females and all that hey symbolized. In this way, it generated much of the emotional heat stoking Manifest Destiny, that is, American imperial conquest both of the continent and then, later, as in the case of Haiti, of the Caribbean Basin. White Zombie must of course be understood in the context of the American invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). As it revisits the terrain inhabited by the American black Other, it also speaks to the history of American slavery. The Other here is African-American, not surprisingly given the date and nature of American society of the day, typically imagined in wildly pejorative fashion in early American arts and culture. This essay explores White Zombie as a modified captivity narrative, pace Last of the Mohicans through John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the Rambo trilogy (1982, 1985, 1988), the Taken trilogy (2008, 1012, 2014), even Mario and Luigi’s efforts to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser.

Early accretional history of the Earth and the Moon-forming event

Lithos ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 30 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 207-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Ross Taylor
Keyword(s):  
The Moon ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of

“The Pleasures of Merely Circulating”

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-174
Author(s):  
Caroline Gelmi
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early American ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
Early National ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Functions

Caroline Gelmi, “‘The Pleasures of Merely Circulating’: Sappho and Early American Newspaper Poetry” (pp. 151–174) This essay examines how early national verse cultures Americanized the popular figure of Sappho. Newspaper parodies of fragment 31, which circulated widely in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mocked English poet Ambrose Philips’s well-known translation of Sappho’s “Phainetai moi” ode in order to address concerns over the role of Englishness in the United States. The parodies achieved these political effects by allegorizing their own conditions of print circulation and deflating the cultural associations of fragment 31 and Philips’s translation with the lyric. In this way, these poems were able to address a number of political issues, from English imperialism in Ireland to the specter of English aristocracy in the U.S. federal government. This study of Sappho’s role as a figure for American print circulation in the early nineteenth century also offers a pre-history of the more familiar midcentury association of Sappho with the Poetess. As a figure for the Poetess, Sappho came to embody anxieties over female authors in the marketplace, representing concerns that the public circulation of the Poetess’ work and the promiscuous circulation of her body were one and the same. This essay tells the rich backstory to these more familiar concepts, tracing Sappho’s earlier entanglements with print circulation and the political and cultural functions she served.

Indigenous Written Sources for the History of Bonny

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 185-196
Author(s):  
Susan M. Hargreaves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Niger Delta ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
Court Records ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Similar Character ◽  
Written Sources

It is well known that indigenous contemporary written documentation exists for the precolonial and early colonial history of some of the coastal societies of South-Eastern Nigeria. The best known example is Old Calabar, for which there exists most notably the diary of Antera Duke, covering the years 1785-88, a document brought from Old Calabar to Britain already during the nineteenth century. More recently John Latham has discovered additional material of a similar character still preserved locally in Old Calabar, principally the Black Davis House Book (containing material dating from the 1830s onwards), the papers of Coco Bassey (including diaries covering the years 1878-89), and the papers of E. O. Offiong (comprising trade ledgers, court records, and letter books relating to the period 1885-1907). In the Niger Delta S. J. S. Cookey, for his biography of King Jaja of Opobo, was able to use contemporary documents in Jaja's own papers, including correspondence from the late 1860s onwards. In the case of the neighboring community of Bonny (from which Jaja seceded to found Opobo after a civil war in 1869), while earlier historians have alluded to the existence of indigenous written documentation, they have done so only in very general terms and without any indication of the quantity or nature of this material.

A Brief History of the Moon

1972 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 72
Author(s):  
John Skoyles
Keyword(s):  
The Moon ◽  
History Of
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