Do you consider Geoffrey Chaucer, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, and Isaac Newton to have lived in ancient times?

A Definitive History of the Mysteries of Easter Island

The NYT echoes a longstanding, condescending trope against Polynesians by using the cover of the book review to refer to the people of Rapa Nui/Easter Island as an "ancient culture." They arrived ~1000 yrs ago & thus did all this cool stuff in the last 10 centuries. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/b...

I was fascinated to learn, while visiting the Slough Museum last summer, that Slough claims the wheelie bin as a local invention.

💔

Now that you have written this phrase on the internet, any attempt to disagree with you would create a paradox. Well played.

Cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle"

The foreword by Janet Browne and Michael Neve made a strong impression on me.

Those books don't make a big show of the degree to which they're informed by wider historiography, but I've long found it uncanny/impressive how they manage to resonate with specialist literature on themes I happen to know about.

Janet Browne's volumes on Darwin are very atmospheric; they might be interesting in this regard.

Alain Corbin "Lure of the Sea" and Helen Rozwadowski "Fathoming the Ocean" are also good on 19th century shifts (reversals) in attitudes toward the beach and the ocean respectively. @oceanhistories.bsky.social

Regarding Victorians' views on/interest in nature (as they would have understood the term), there is a lot of work on the social history of natural history (including as a hobby for both sexes). For something closer to history of environmental attitudes, histories of coal pollution are promising.

P.S., don't anybody take this too seriously!

All the criminals in their RNA ties...

We are also currently hiring a curatorial fellow to work with the papers of Rosalind Franklin and others in the History of Molecular Biology Collection!

This is a 2-year staff position in the archive with a salary of $55k/year and full benefits:

www.sciencehistory.org/research/fel...

I can recommend this, along with work by Staffan Müller-Wille.

www.jstor.org/stable/10.10...

The topic also comes up in a lot of Staffan Müller-Wille's work.

www.jstor.org/stable/10.10...