STS Circle at Harvard [image.png] John Dixon Harvard, History
on A Trackful Ocean: Ships' Routes on the Eighteenth-century Atlantic Monday, December 10 12:15-2:00 p.m. Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F [image.png] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to sts<mailto:[email protected]>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:[email protected]> by 5pm Wednesday, December 5. Abstract: From George Washington to Percy Bysshe Shelley to Dungeons and Dragons, the physical mutability of the “trackless ocean” has long served symbolically to represent uncertainty in human experience. However, descriptions of commercial shipping and the associated “lanes” and “routes” have suggested a starkly different understanding of oceans, traversed over a handful of established tracks defined by winds, currents, navigational knowledge, economics, and politics. Using logbooks of completed voyages on the eighteenth-century Atlantic Ocean, this talk will test the extent to which mariners’ real paths reflected either the unpredictability of a trackless sea or the orderliness of the routes described in contemporary publications. It will propose as an alternative a historical model for a trackful ocean in which travel was frequent and patterned but not strictly circumscribed. Biography:John Dixon is a PhD candidate in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. In his dissertation he uses manuscript logbooks and GIS software to map ships at sea in the late eighteenth-century, 1775-1800. He is broadly interested in early American science, technology, and material culture and has studied topics ranging from colonial brick regulation to the history of semaphore telegraphs. He holds an AM degree in History from Harvard and bachelor’s degrees in History and Ceramic and Materials Engineering from Clemson University. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/ Follow us on Facebook: STS@Harvard<http://www.facebook.com/HarvardSTS> _______________________________________________
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