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 also the co-author (along with Ben Maddison and Kimberley Norris) of “Beyond the Heroic Stereotype: ...
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 European and North American readers. Cañizares-Esguerra is a professor of history at the University of T...
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.
Andrew Denning talks about the Nazi cult of mobility, a set of ideas and practices that were crucial to its racist ideology. Denning is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is the author the essay “'Life is Movement, Movement is life!' Mobility Politics and the Circulatory State in Nazi Germany,” published in the American Historical Review .
Annette Joseph-Gabriel speaks to Jessica Nabongo about her quest to be the first black woman to travel to all of the countries of the world. Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Nabongo is a writer, entrepreneur, and the founder of Jet Black, a boutique luxury travel company that promotes tourism to Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.
Journalist Carl Hoffman talks about Bruno Manser and Michael Palmieri, two men who arrived in Borneo with very different dreams and aspirations. Hoffman served as a contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler and Wired Magazine. He is the author of The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure .
Dr. Beth Taylor talks about the physiological differences between men and women athletes and why ultra-endurance events seem to offer certain performance advantages to women. Taylor is an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut and the Director of Exercise Physiology Research in Cardiology at Hartford Hospital.
Lucianne Walkowicz talks about the ethics of colonizing Mars and new developments in the search for extraterrestrial life. Walkowicz held the 2017 NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. She is currently an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium.
Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers who wanted to test the theory during the solar eclipse of 1919. Kennefick is an associate professor of physics at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He’s the author of No Shadow of Doubt: the 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity .
Emily Kern talks about the search for human origins in the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically why anthropologists came to see Africa – rather than Asia – as the cradle of the human species. Kern is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in New Earth Histories at the University of New South Wales.
Director Robert Stone talks about his film Chasing the Moon , a three-part documentary which aired on PBS’s American Experience for the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.
Margaret Schotte talks about how sailors were trained to do the difficult and dangerous work of navigation in the early modern world. Schotte is an Assistant Professor of History at York University. She is the author of Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill.
Ed Armston-Sheret talks about the mysterious disease of scurvy: how it affected expeditioners and why it was so difficult to understand. Armston-Sheret is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway University of London. He’s the author of "Tainted bodies : scurvy, bad food and the reputation of the British National Antarctic Expedition, 1901–1904," published this year in the Journal of Historical Geography .
Dani Inkpen talks about expedition life in the Juneau Icefield, home to some of the most spectacular glaciers in North America. In the 1940s, it was the place where science and mountaineering joined hands and, occasionally, came into conflict. Inkpen is a Faculty Fellow at NYU Gallatin. She is the author of "The Scientific Life in the Alpine: Recreation and Moral Life in the Field," (Isis, Sept 2018).
Amy Shira Teitel talks about Apollo and the community of people who are deeply attached to space history. Teitel is a spaceflight historian and the creator of the YouTube Channel, Vintage Space . She is also the author of two books, Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA and Apollo Pilot: The Memory of Astronaut Don Eisele .
Russell Potter discusses new developments in the search for answers about the tragic Franklin Expedition that disappeared in the Arctic in 1845. Potter is a professor of English and Media Studies at Rhode Island College. He's the author of Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-year Search.
Jake Robins and Michael Robinson talk about the quest to explore Mars: how it compares to earlier eras of exploration in the West and in the Arctic as well as its power to capture the imagination of thousands of people. Robins is the host of WeMartians, a podcast that considers the exploration of the Red Planet from a variety of angles, both technical and scientific.
Scott Wallace talks about his trip to Brazil reporting on the efforts of the Guajajara people to protect uncontacted tribes from loggers, miners, and poachers. Wallace is a professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut, a contributor to National Geographic, and a former reporter for CBS and CNN. He's the author of The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes .
Valerie Olson talks about why the idea of outer space as a "frontier" is giving way to one that frames it as a cosmic ecosystem. Olson is an associate professor of anthropology at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth .
In Part II, Ruth Gruenthal continues her story of her family's escape from France in 1940. She also discusses the challenges of living in the United States after the war.
Joyce Ashuntantang talks about her experiences as a traveler and a poet, from her childhood Cameroon to her years studying in Great Britain and the United States. Ashuntantang is a professor of English at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. She is the author of many works of poetry, including Beautiful Fire , published this year with Spears Media Press.
Ruth Gruenthal talks about her life in Germany as the Nazi Party came to power in the 1930s. Gruenthal and her family – along with thousands of Jewish refugees -- raced to escape France when the Germans invaded in the summer of 1940. Gruenthal is a practicing psychotherapist in New York City. She’s also the daughter of the publisher Kurt Enoch who co-founded the New American Library in the United States after World War II.
Anthropologist P.J. Capelotti discusses the role of exploration archaeology in understanding the Pacific voyage of Kon-Tiki, the Arctic airship expeditions of Walter Wellman, and the fate of Orca II, a fishing boat used in the film Jaws.
Bruce Strickrott talks about the value of human exploration of the deep sea. Strickrott is the Program Manager and Senior Pilot of the United States’ deepest diving science submersible, the DSV Alvin which is owned by the US Navy and operated out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He has participated in over 60 science expeditions and piloted over 365 dives in Alvin, spending over 2000 hours underwater.
Emily Gibson talks about women, aviation, and global air travel. Gibson is an associate historian at the National Science Foundation.
Max Edelson talk about the British Board of Trade’s ambitious project to explore and survey British America from the St Lawrence River to the islands of the Caribbean. Edelson is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. He's the author of The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence .
