Time to Eat the Dogs

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 Spectacl...

Matthias Determann talks about the importance of the space sciences in the Arab World. Determann is an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. He is the author of  Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East .

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 America...

Annette Joseph-Gabriel talks with Tiffany Gill about the history of African American travel in the late twentieth century and its importance to black communities across the lines of class and gender. Joseph-Gabriel is an assistant professor of French at the University of Michigan, College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Gill is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies & History and Cochran...

Radio host Kevin Fox interviews me about the history of American Arctic exploration. The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition in 1845 turned the Arctic into an object of fascination. By the end of the century, it had become an 'Arctic Fever.'

Adrian Wisnicki talks about the British expeditionary literature of the late 1800s. Wisnicki is the author of  Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature .

Rachel Walker talks about physiognomy -- the study of the human face -- and why it was so popular among scientists and the general public. Walker is an assistant professor of history at the University of Hartford. She is completing a book based on her dissertation, "A Beautiful Mind: Faces, Beauty, and the Brain in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1780-1860."

Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin's experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. Sponsel's close reading of Darwin's journals and letters reveals insights about the man that would become known as the father of evolution. Sponsel is the author of  Darwin's Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation.

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 discover...

Ingrid Horrocks talks about the way women travelers, specifically women wanderers, are represented in late-eighteenth century literature. Horrocks in an associate professor in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of  Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 .

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 this year by t...

Erika Milam talks about the scientific search for human nature, a project that captured the attention of paleontologists, anthropologists, and primatologists in the years after World War II. Milam is a professor of history at Princeton University. She is the author of  Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America .

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.

Dr. Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of  Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration.

Shayne Legassie talks about Medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages played in creating modern conceptions of travel and travel writing. Legassie is an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the au...

Neil Maher talks about the social forces that shaped NASA in the 1960s and 1970s, connecting the space race with the radical upheavals of the counterculture. Maher is a professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark. He is the author of  Apollo in the Age of Aquarius .

Andrew Wright Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose posthumous reputation has changed many times since his disappearance 170 years ago. Hurley is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He's the author of  Ludwig Leichhardt's Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth .

Annette Joseph Gabrielle talks with Bianca 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. Joseph-Gabrielle is an assistant professor of French at the University of Minnesota. Williams is an associate professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She...

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.

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  Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans  (Reaktion, 2018). 

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...

Artist 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.

Andrea Wulf's book the  The Invention of Nature  tells the story of Alexander von Humboldt, one of the world's most important nineteenth-century explorers. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra talks about some of the problems of the book, specifically how Wulf's view of Humboldt divorces him from the intellectual traditions of Central and South American scholars who helped Humboldt imagine the Americas for Eu...

Matthew James talks about the 1905 Galapagos Expedition organized by the California Academy of Sciences. James is a professor of geology at Sonoma State University. He is the author of  Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that Vindicated Darwin .

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.