History of Science

Scottish people don’t figure prominently in most histories of slave trade. When Scots are mentioned, people usually point to the writings of Adam Smith and

In my history of science survey, we talk about how ancient cosmologies reflect the geography of the people. Thus the Nile River civilizations believe in mostly benevolent gods that bring annual, pr…

Here at OU, there are at least 4 or 5 that teach introductory R. You can take a statistics class, an economics class, a biological stats class, or a class just on R as a programming language. R has…

For the next few weeks, I will be taking a history course, something I thought I would never do again after I finished my dissertation. Shawn Graham is

Alchemy, as a field of study, was thought to answer several different questions making it hard to define. Alchemy was used to study ontology; that is,

*This post is the first section of a talk I gave at the 7th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science. In 1756, fifty-nine students attended William Cullen’s (1710…

Today I attended the 3rd Digital Humanities Day at OU. Below I’ve identified a couple of the emergent themes and given my thoughts. Below that, I included notes on each talk. Making as a Mean…

For the last couple of years, I have been working with my colleague John Perkins on building a database called Situating Chemistry. With this database we have been collecting information about the …

Joseph Black (1728-1799) was one of the best known and most influential chemists during the second half of the eighteenth century. Black’s correspondence, recently published by Jean Jones an…