Author: Helen L. Morgan Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 152
Book Description
Summary: A biography of a feminist who was the first woman science professor at Vassar College and the first American woman astronomer
Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Presents a biography of Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), America's first woman astronomer, provided by the nonprofit corporation Women in History, based in Lakewood, Ohio. Posts contact information via mailing address, telephone number, and e-mail. Includes a list of suggested reading on Mitchell. Links to the Women in History home page and other resources on Mitchell.
Author: Helen Wright Publisher: ISBN: 9788027309566 Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Maria Mitchell was an American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator. In 1847, she discovered a comet named 1847 VI that was later known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet" in her honor. She won a gold medal prize for her discovery, which was presented to her by King Christian VIII of Denmark in 1848. Mitchell was the first internationally known woman to work as both a professional astronomer and a professor of astronomy after accepting a position at Vassar College in 1865. She was also the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Excerpt: "It was fifty-five minutes past eleven on a morning in 1831. The sun shone brilliantly down on a solitary island off the coast of Massachusetts, home port of whalers who had sailed away over uncharted seas, guided only by the stars. At a small brass telescope stood a man with far-seeing hazel eyes. He turned for a moment and nodded reassuringly at his curly -headed little daughter seated on the stool beside him. The dark eyes of one reflected the deep intensity of the other as they turned again to their allotted tasks with a profound absorption that nothing on earth could disturb..."
Author: Maria Mitchell Publisher: ISBN: 9781789873498 Category : Languages : en Pages : 154
Book Description
Maria Mitchell was among the first female astronomers. This is her story in her own words, compiled from letters and diary entries as she toured academies to deliver her scientific lectures. Born in Massachusetts in 1818, Maria demonstrated an affinity for astronomy and science from a young age. At the time it was almost impossible for a woman to gain a formal education in science; as a young housewife and later as a schoolteacher Maria read many books and thereby educated herself. The most practical application of astronomy in Maria's time was in navigation and shipping; the use of the heavens to steer oceangoing ships on the right course was crucial. Before becoming a scientist in her own right, Maria had already become familiar with naval equipment, astronomical concepts, and use of the telescope. Her discovery of a comet in 1847 caused a great stir, yet respect and awards for her accomplishment swiftly followed. Maria Mitchell became something of a sensation, and would spend the following decades authoring and publishing papers and delivering lectures to academic audiences. In maturity, having amply demonstrated her abilities as an astronomer, she was granted a professorship at Vassar College.
Author: Hayley Barrett Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1481487604 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 44
Book Description
Discover the amazing true story of Maria Mitchell, America’s first professional female astronomer. Every evening, from the time she was a child, Maria Mitchell stood on her rooftop with her telescope and swept the sky. And then one night she saw something unusual—a comet no one had ever seen before! Miss Mitchell’s extraordinary discovery made her famous the world over and paved the way for her to become America’s first professional female astronomer. Gorgeously illustrated by Diana Sudyka, this moving picture book about a girl from humble beginnings who became a star in the field of astronomy is sure to inspire budding scientists everywhere.
Author: Renée L. Bergland Publisher: Beacon Press ISBN: 9780807021422 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
New England blossomed in the nineteenth century, producing a crop of distinctively American writers along with distinguished philosophers and jurists, abolitionists and scholars. A few of the female stars of this era-Emily Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, and Susan B. Anthony, for instance-are still appreciated, but there are a number of intellectual women whose crucial roles in the philosophical, social, and scientific debates that roiled the era have not been fully examined. Among them is the astronomer Maria Mitchell. She was raised in isolated but cosmopolitan Nantucket, a place brimming with enthusiasm for intellectual culture and hosting the luminaries of the day, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Sojourner Truth. Like many island girls, she was encouraged to study the stars. Given the relative dearth of women scientists today, most of us assume that science has always been a masculine domain. But as Renee Bergland reminds us, science and humanities were not seen as separate spheres in the nineteenth century; indeed, before the Civil War, women flourished in science and mathematics, disciplines that were considered less politically threatening and less profitable than the humanities. Mitchell apprenticed with her father, an amateur astronomer; taught herself the higher math of the day; and for years regularly "swept" the clear Nantucket night sky with the telescope in her rooftop observatory. In 1847, thanks to these diligent sweeps, Mitchell discovered a comet and was catapulted to international fame. Within a few years she was one of America's first professional astronomers; as "computer of Venus"-a sort of human calculator-for the U.S. Navy's Nautical Almanac, she calculated the planet's changing position. After an intellectual tour of Europe that included a winter in Rome with Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mitchell was invited to join the founding faculty at Vassar College, where she spent her later years mentoring the next generation of women astronomers. Tragically, opportunities for her students dried up over the next few decades as the increasingly male scientific establishment began to close ranks. Mitchell protested this cultural shift in vain. "The woman who has peculiar gifts has a definite line marked out for her," she wrote, "and the call from God to do his work in the field of scientific investigation may be as imperative as that which calls the missionary into the moral field or the mother into the family . . . The question whether women have the capacity for original investigation in science is simply idle until equal opportunity is given them." In this compulsively readable biography, Renee Bergland chronicles the ideological, academic, and economic changes that led to the original sexing of science-now so familiar that most of us have never known it any other way. "The best thing in its line since Dava Sobel's Longitude. Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science tells a great, if too little known, story of an intellectual woman in 19th century New England. And it is beautifully told: I simply could not put it down. Anyone who cares about women's education in America should read this compelling and indispensable book." -Robert D. Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism "Renee Bergland recounts the story of Maria Mitchell's life and work in glorious and careful detail. One feels and hears the sounds of Mitchell's native Nantucket, her adopted Vassar, and comes to understand how one of the 'gentler sex' advanced astronomy in her day." -Londa Schiebinger, author of Has Feminism Changed Science?
Author: Dava Sobel Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 069814869X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science Friday Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A joy to read.” —The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.
Author: Helen L. Morgan
Author: Maria Mitchell
Author: Maria Mitchell
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Author: Beatrice Gormley
Author: Helen Wright
Author: Maria Mitchell
Author: Hayley Barrett
Author: Renée L. Bergland
Author: Dava Sobel