Professor Ahmed F. Ghoniem, MIT president Susan Hockfield, and American DG Energy chairman George N. Hatsopoulos look at the life of thermodynamicist Joseph Henry Keenan and his contributions to the field and to the teaching of the subject. They also look at the history of thermodynamics more generally.
Author John M. Barry discusses the global flu outbreak of 1918, which is estimated to have killed from 50 to 100 million people worldwide. He looks at the U.S. government's response to the outbreak, and considers the impact such an outbreak would have on the U.S. and the world today.
From the Gilder Lehrman Institute:
Elliott West, Distinguished Professor of the American West and the American Indian at the University of Arkansas, describes how guns and horses changed Native American culture, while European diseases ravaged the indigenous people of the New World who had no inherent immunity to them.
Offers hundreds of lesson plans composed by teachers, on a variety of subjects, organized into three groups—K-5, 6-8, and 9-12. Provides 31 plans for grades 9-12 on U.S. history topics, including civil rights, balancing budgets, jazz, opposing views of the Vietnam War, Native American history, the Cold War, Japanese-Americans during World War II, racism, NATO, the Salem Witch Trials, U.S.-Cuba relations, and "The Power of Fiction," focusing on socially-relevant texts. Also includes 33 Literature plans—many on works by American authors—and plans for world history and ancient history. Valuable for high-school level history teachers.
This installment of PBS's American Experience series narrates the rise and fall of Dr. Walter Freeman, inventor of the prefrontal lobotomy, and the practice of lobotomy as a whole. It looks at how this procedure became popularly accepted and then denounced as horrific and barbaric.
Unfortunately, this content is no longer free to the public; however, PBS offers a short preview video and options to purchase a full copy of the documentary.
Kenneth Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor in History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University, describes the ways in which 19th-century cities evolved from disorganized, unregulated communities into modern cities focusing on order, safety, and public health. Professor Jackson looks at the motivations behind these developments as well as implementation strategies.
Who invented the telephone?
The answer to this question has been argued ever since Alexander Graham Bell filed his patent application for the telephone in 1876. Much of the argument has focused on whether Bell should be awarded the palm for its invention or whether it should go to Chicago inventor Elisha Gray, who was conducting experiments at the same time as Bell, was in contact with him, and who filed documentation with the patent office for a telephone device a few hours before Bell. Newspaper reporting at the time—noticeable especially in The Chicago Tribune (Gray lived in nearby Highland Park)—waffled in whether to attribute the new invention to Bell or to Gray.
Answering the question was and is important in the awarding of patents and because of the financial boon that accrues to the patent holder. In fact, the Patent Office and the courts long ago examined the claims of Bell and Gray, and when the smoke cleared, Bell had his patent. Nevertheless, historians Seth Shulman and Edward Evenson have recently wrestled with the evidence surrounding the competing patent claims and have concluded that Bell's application was unfairly strengthened through his inclusion of material describing, in effect, Gray's experiments, the knowledge of which, they argue, Bell gained either from the patent attorneys that he and Gray had engaged or from a corrupt Patent Office official. Thus, the controversy over the awarding of the patent continues, at least for historians.
Not only historians, however, wade into historical questions of who was first with this or that discovery or creation. Politicians are seldom shy about pronouncing on such issues—often, it appears, out of a desire to honor the achievements of people of particular ethnic backgrounds. In June 2002, for example, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a (non-binding) resolution honoring Italian inventor Antonio Meucci, who apparently did invent a delicate and primitive telephone some time in the 1850s. Ten days after the U.S. resolution, the Canadian Parliament "countered" by honoring the Scottish-born, long-time Canadian resident Alexander Graham Bell as the telephone's true inventor.
History would be easier if each invention had a single inventor. Sometimes this is the case—but often it is not, despite our tendency to identify a solitary genius in whose mind a great idea suddenly lit up fully-formed. Rather (more?) often, many people work on a problem at the same time, making incremental approaches toward a solution, and influencing each other in the process. In such cases, crediting one person with the solution or invention can seem arbitrary. The claim to invention per se is sometimes buttressed through impressive efforts at self-promotion or by successes in organizing the invention's commercial exploitation.
Alexander Graham Bell, Lab notebook, describing his experiments with the telephone, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trr002.html.
Bell's patent application (174465, July 27, 1875) for the telephone, at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PAL….
Elisha Gray's patent application (166095, July 27, 1875) for an "Electrical Telegraph for Transmitting Musical Tones" at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PAL….
Elisha Gray's "caveat" filed at the Patent Office a few hours before Bell's patent application:
http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/GRAY_PATENT.html.
"Antonio Meucci Revisited":
http://www.chezbasilio.it/antenna.htm.
Lewis Coe, The Telephone and Its Several Inventors: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995).
A. Edward Evenson, The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876: The Elisha Gray - Alexander Graham Bell Controversy and Its Many Players (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000).
Seth Shulman, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2008).
Image source: "Helen of Many Glacier Hotel, June 25, 1925," Bain News Service, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
According to the Gilder Lehrman website:
"Distinguished American historian and counselor to presidents, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. had a ringside seat to the most pivotal moments of the 20th century. Schlesinger's Journals: 1952-2000, the second volume of his journals, were published in 2007 to great acclaim. The Gilder Lehrman Institute presents a 2001 Historians' Forum that he delivered on the first volume of his journals, A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950. Schlesinger focuses particularly on how perceptions of progress, government, and human nature changed in the face of the two World Wars and the rise of government forms that challenged democracy."
The history of the eugenics movement in the United States, from its inception in the decades following the Civil War through its height in the first few decades of the 20th century, is traced on this website. As we move into the age of genetics, this movement, that sought to filter "bad" traits from the human population, becomes increasingly important to understand.
The movement's history is told through a narrative divided into eight themes, including social and scientific origins, research methods and traits studied, flaws in these methods, ways in which the movement was popularized, immigration restriction, and marriage and sterilization laws. Each narrative is accompanied by roughly 10 primary sources—reports, articles, charts, legal documents, and photographs. These materials provide a succinct introduction to eugenics in the U.S.
In addition to the narratives, visitors can search or browse the Image Archive, featuring more than 2,000 primary sources, including documents, artwork, photographs, and more. Visitors may browse by topic, object type, time period, or the archive sources' originals are held by, or search by keyword or ID number. Note that primary sources cannot be downloaded from the Flash version of the Archive, though they can be from the HTML version of the site.
According to BackStory:
"In 1815, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia sent enough ash into the sky to disrupt the world’s weather for the next year. In New England, 1816 became known as 'The Year Without a Summer.' Snow fell in June and July. Crops and animals died. Tens of thousands of people picked up and left; their search for greener pastures became an early chapter in a larger story of westward expansion.
This week on BackStory, we tackle extreme weather: how we’ve tried to predict it, control it, make sense of it. Along the way, we discover that our responses to wind, sleet, and rain have said as much about us as about the natural world."