Peopling the Past
The project team have certainly been making the most of the conference scene recently. Last week saw some of us spending a thought-provoking two days at the National Maritime Museum, at their ‘Peopling...
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Making sense of absence
I find it striking how our understanding of the early Board of Longitude is defined as much by the absence of evidence as by its presence. For example, there is the perennial question: Was the...
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Judging a book by its cover
In an only partially successful attempt to escape England’s weather, Katy, Sophie and I spent a week in April enjoying what should have been sunny California. This was for an interdisciplinary workshop...
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Tainted by trade
A few days ago, I attended an interesting talk by HPS doctoral student Michelle Wallis about medical handbill advertisements in seventeenth-century England. These were one-sheet advertisements of...
View ArticleWould you credit it?
I started 2013 with an academic bang attending the annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies for three days last week. The theme was ‘Credit, Money and the Market’ which...
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The Perks of Digitizing the Archive
Detail from RGO14/44 One of the opportunities that was open to members of the Board of Longitude project has been to get involved with producing written summaries of the content of all the Royal...
View ArticleYou don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps
Lucy Worsley, head curator at Historic Royal Palaces, has just finished presenting a series on BBC 1 called ‘Fit to Rule.’ In this she is considering the medical strengths and weaknesses of the British...
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Longitude? It’s patently obvious
This is cross-posted from the British Library Social Science blog, with their kind permission … — Blog readers of a certain age will remember well one of my favourite lines from Nick Park’s animation...
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When John Harrison and the Board of Longitude were wrangling over the disclosure of H4 in the mid-1760s, one phrase proved particularly tricky. The Harrisons constantly returned to the phrase...
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A second in one-hundred days – the results
The last time I wrote about Clock B, we had just commenced an official 100-day trial to see if it would keep up with John Harrison’s expectations. In the last blog post the conditions and aims of the...
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