 Let's sort of delve into some historical themes. Let's think a little bit together about the ways in which we should consider and the ways in which individuals in the past have considered the importance of the relevance of eclipses. So I have a series of general observations that I'd like to make. And along the way, I'm going to show you a range of documentary evidence and visual evidence to show how eclipses have figured in the popular consciousness in a range of different cultures and societies. So in the first instance here, this is from a French archive in Toulouse, as you can see from the attribution at the bottom. This is an illuminated manuscript. This is the common form of producing books prior to the invention of the printing press. So you have the text here. And then in the corners, we're often these illuminations. This is an illumination of a lunar eclipse. It doesn't fully capture what actually happens in a lunar eclipse, of course, which is that the Earth gets in the way, the Earth's shadow, sorry, is cast, it gets in the way, basically, of the sun and the moon. And the Earth's shadow is cast on the moon and then you get this sort of reddish moon. But here we just see what's about to happen, which is the sun moving across the moon, which is not quite what happens in the course of a lunar eclipse. But nonetheless, a natural phenomenon occurring and being represented in this medieval manuscript. And I'll talk a lot about images throughout the discussion today. But let's talk about some of these observations. The first observation I wanna make, observation number one, curiously, is that eclipses have been used for millennia to mark the passage of time and to indicate to individuals and to readers the ways in which time has marched on, has passed. I've got, again, two additional examples of manuscript material that just sort of helps us to understand, again, the range of ways in which people were conceptualizing this. So this is a 15th century series of diagrams about lunar eclipses, solar eclipses, excuse me. And then over here are men observing the stars. And this is a early 14th century manuscript. But again, reminding us of the importance of astrology as a science, as a means of trying to interpret what was going to happen in the world and what might happen to individuals, in fact. So just a couple of examples of this. One of the ways in which ancient historians have determined, although this remains disputed, when the first Olympic games occurred in ancient Greece is by actually assessing lunar eclipses that are marked in different forms of historical writing. So they were able to date the first ancient lunar eclipse to about 776 BCE, before common era, although this date is somewhat open to dispute. And we see this in a range of very early writing. So if you look at the medieval world, for example, beads are sometimes referred to as Saint Bead or the venerable bead, who was an English monk. In 731, he wrote the ecclesiastical history of the English people. And he uses eclipses in that work to mark the passage of time. And this is something that one can trace through a variety of different sources as we move through the late Middle Ages and into the early modern period and the modern period even. But this is what he said of 664. In the year of our Lord 664, the sun was eclipsed on May the 3rd at about the 10th hour. In the same year, a sudden plague depopulated the southern parts of Britain and also prevailed in the province of Northumbria. So what you pick up here are two things. Using the eclipse as a way of marking the passage of time and then linking the eclipse to, in this instance, an episode of cataclysm, an episode of decimation of the population in the form of a plague. And what is implicit here and what is part of the worldview that people like bead shared and possessed or possessed and shared, was this notion that eclipses were in some way, shape, or form, causative factors in history, that eclipses were something that caused a particular kind of historical change and usually something that caused an especially bad event. A plague, a fire, the death of a monarch, the death of a pope. And I'll talk more about these things in just a moment. And we see this in a variety of different places. I'm just going to talk very quickly about one example here that is reflected in a manuscript. This is a 15th century manuscript in the British Library. And what you have going on here is actually a depiction of the life of Alexander the Great, the great king of Macedon. In this instance, it is a battle, a depiction of a battle or actually one army in the battle from 331, right? That battle was the battle, sometimes referred to as the battle of Arbella or in some instances the battle of Guagamella. This is in present day Kurdistan. Now that battle occurs in 331. This is a history from the 15th century. But what we have here is a lot of different kind of cultural work being done in this one illustration. So here we have Alexander the Great consulting with his astrologers. You can see the eclipse in the background here. Here we have the soldiers looking to the eclipse. If you get closer to the manuscript, they're actually looking in great fear. They're quite fearful of what's going to happen as a result of this eclipse. And you've got a lot of different things going on here. A sense that eclipse was foreboding, a sense that the eclipse was a sign that needed to be interpreted. And then also within the image, because people know the outcome, Alexander the Great defeats Darius III, the Persian prince and his army. And so in this case, there's a kind of implicit understanding that the eclipse foreshadows a victory, right? So there's a lot of stuff going on there that allows us to sort of think about the different historical meanings that have been assigned in the past and of course, to a certain degree in the present, but in this case in the 15th century. So continuity between the ancient world and the late medieval world. Now I should say that this idea of eclipses as causative in some way is something that carries forward. There have been people, believe it or not, who have studied the correlation between the occurrence of eclipses and shifts in the stock market. So I'll be interested to see what happens on Monday. And in 2004, for those of you who are Red Sox fans, when the Red Sox won the World Series in game four against the St. Louis Cardinals, there happened to be a lunar eclipse over St. Louis in that particular year. And many people interpreted that as a good omen for the Red Sox and perhaps as a causative factor, something that led to their victory. Who knows? Okay, let's think about a third observation here. And this relates a little more to some of the more detailed examples that I'm gonna go into in just a couple of minutes. This is the notion that eclipses and other kinds of astronomical movements have an influence on earthly behaviors and bodily health. And this is something we see in a variety of different contexts across time. So I wanna give you just a couple of examples and I'm gonna remove myself from the podium because it's not my normal way of doing these things. And it will also allow me to look a little more directly at these images. So let's talk about the first one. In the first one, all of you will probably have some familiar with Ptolemy. Ptolemy lives from about 100 to 170 CE. He was an astrologer, among other things, of Greek ancestry, but he lived and worked in Alexandria in present day Egypt, which at the time of his life was controlled by the Roman Empire. So we have a lot of different groups involved here and that has to do with both the sort of ways in which the Greek and Roman empires developed and also the migration of peoples in that part of the world. Ptolemy is known for a variety of theories about the earth and its relationship to the stars or to the heavens, but his tetrabeblos, his four books, which was a treatise on astronomy, said this, heavenly bodies in relation to each other and to the signs of the zodiac exert powerful influences on the terrestrial sphere. So thinking about the ways in which there's a correlation between heavenly bodies and what happens on earth. Now we can also see this in other ancient thinkers, the works of ancient thinkers. Galen of Pergamon, who's probably one of the most important ancient medical thinkers and practitioners, in fact. He, too, is someone of Greek ancestry, born in Turkey, present day Turkey, but who worked largely in Rome, sort of thinking again about the imperial dynamics of that part of the world. Now in this case, Galen of Pergamon is known for, most notably for what is sometimes referred to as Galenic theory or Galenic ideas, the notion that the body is possessed of four significant bodily humors. Those are black bile, phlegm, yellow bile, and blood. And those humors, those liquid substances, if you like, dictate both the health of the body and the composition of the mind, the way in which the mind functions. And the theories are actually much more complex than that, but there needed to be a balance in the humors for the body to remain healthy. Galen also, however, drew a direct correlation between the configuration of the heavens at the time of an individual's birth and their health and character development. So there was a direct correlation between the configuration of the heavens. If you were born on an eclipse, you would have certain character traits. Or if you were born under the sign of a certain planet, much like astrology today, that would indicate or dictate your health or your set of developments. A third figure here is drawn in this instance from the Middle Eastern world, Abu Mashaar Al-Balki. He was the royal astrologer at the court in Baghdad. And his work in that court revolved largely around charting planetary revolutions that he said would enable predictions about the achievements, temperaments, and business affairs of the rich and the poor alike. So thinking again about the direct correlations between the movement of the heavens and earthly existence in this case. And he was particularly interested in eclipses, an interest that carries forward into the early modern period. Historians sort of divide the world into a variety of weird periods. When we talk about the early modern period, we're talking about the period between about 1500 and 1700 or 1750. So in the case of Cardono, whose first name I misspelled, we tried to fix it, but I couldn't. It's an O instead of an A. In the case of Cardono, who lives from 1501 to 1576, he argued not only that eclipses have an impact on the individual, but that eclipses had the power to act upon cities, upon provinces, and upon kingdoms. So they had the ability as natural phenomena to influence sort of the geopolitical realm. So he had an interesting set of ideas that he was putting forward there. Now, a couple of hundred or 150 years later, the English astronomer John Gadbury wrote in his Speculum astrologicum, or an astrological glass. He argued that eclipses that were to occur that year would produce, and these are his words, strange corruptions in man's bodies, tedious cold and dry diseases, either of the mind or of the body. And he argued that this would occur throughout London. It's interesting that these things were appearing, in this case, John Gadbury, at a moment of great political unrest in the British Isles, particularly in England and Ireland and in Scotland, where they were experiencing both, well, civil war initially, and then the aftermath of that civil war. So it's not uncommon for people to be sort of looking to the heavens to explain what's going on on Earth at that particular moment, which is a little bit of what Gadbury was doing. So the next observation I want to make is this notion that appears in the title, and this is the idea that eclipses have functioned historically as omens, and I could cite many, many examples of this. I'll just give one. This is the case of Pope Urban VIII. Pope Urban VIII was born Mepheo Vincenzo Barbarini. He lived from 1568 to 1644, and he was Pope from 1623 to 1644. Now, he was one of these unfortunate religious figures, like, and as the leader of the Catholic Church, was subject to a wide range of speculation, as were a number of monarchs throughout Europe at this point in time. And on several different occasions in the 1620s and 1630s, his death was predicted that would occur in the aftermath of an eclipse, and at several different points, he fires and rehires astrologers to kind of modify the predictions. In fact, the predictions don't come to pass, but what they remind us of is that people were constantly thinking about the way in which an event like an eclipse might be interpreted as a sign. So this is kind of a constant throughout history, and I've been marching very quickly through a range of centuries here. This is his tomb, incidentally, in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. It's quite a spectacular tomb if you haven't seen it. You know, he was not shy about celebrating his glory. So, as you can see there. Okay. The last observation I wanna make before I dig a little more deeply into some issues is the notion of eclipses as sources of inspiration in literature and in art. And the quotes that I have here are probably gonna be familiar to some of you if you have read your Shakespeare, as probably many of us have, either willingly or not. For me, it was always unwillingly. I never liked Shakespeare. I realize that's probably not a good thing to say as a British historian. But William Shakespeare is living between 1564 and 1616, operating in a context of great social change in England and also the beginnings of the creation of what would become known, come to be known as the British Empire. But in two of his plays, he refers to eclipses as particular signs. In this instance, the first Richard II, which is circa 1595 to 1597. One of the lines is that one of the signs that for run the death or fall of kings was that of a pale-faced moon that looks bloody on the earth. This is, of course, a reference to a lunar eclipse. The second is probably more famous. It comes from the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, which was performed in 1606. And this is a very famous quote, the late eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good to us. This is a very famous quote. What is appearing here, of course, once again, is the very notion that this natural occurrence is something that needs to be given prominence and precedence and something that needs to be interpreted and understood through a variety of different lenses that are, of course, always determined by the historical context or the historical culture in which they appear. I wanted to show you that this also appears artistically in a variety of different venues. If you've looked at paintings from the Renaissance earlier in some instances and later of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, you will see that, of course, they are often depicted in a very sort of gloomy, dark atmosphere. That's, of course, meant to convey the seriousness of that event, but it's also meant to convey the speculation, the theory that that event occurred during an eclipse. This is a more kind of frivolous depiction, I guess. This is from Vienna in 1842 by an Austrian artist, Johann Christian Scholler. And this is showing a solar eclipse. You can see it here. It's very clearly at the moment when there's as full of an obscuring of the sun as they're going to be. Here's the corona. But you can see there's a kind of fair-like atmosphere and I'm gonna talk more about that fair-like atmosphere in just a couple of minutes. Okay, so let me dive a little more deeply. And what I wanna do in the next couple of slides is really talk through with you some particular episodes, some particular developments that help us to understand a little bit more about the way eclipsed have functioned historically. So in the first instance here, this is just an image as a kind of transitional image, but I like this image. It's quite a beautiful image. It's an image of a solar eclipse that occurred in 1706 in Switzerland over Lake Zurich. And you can see in this instance, I somehow doubt it's gonna be that bright on Monday. That's just my hunch. But you can see that what's being emphasized here is both the fall of darkness, the ability to see the stars, and then most importantly, the full eclipse and the corona here. But of course, people observing, right? So lest we think the notion that 200,000 people arriving in Burlington or in Vermont is something that is unique to this particular moment, it's not, right? It's occurred many times over the last century, but also throughout history. Okay, so I wanna turn to the place I know best in the world as a scholar, and that is London. And I wanna talk about an event called Black Monday, which occurred on March the 29th, 1652, not surprisingly, the Black Monday in this instance refers not to the crash of a stock market, but in fact, to an eclipse, to an eclipse that occurs that day. This is what London looked like around that time. This is an image depicting London around 1630. So if you're thinking about present day London, this is the site of St. Paul's Cathedral, but of course that's not what St. Paul's Cathedral looks like now because this cathedral was the one that stood until the great fire of London in 1666. This was what at the time was referred to as London Bridge, of course London Bridge looks nothing like this any longer, but you can see the ubiquity of these spires, you can see what the South Bank, this is the South Bank of the river, what that looks like. And you can see, of course, the very vibrant city life that's occurring on the river and in other parts of the city. This event is an important one in understanding how contemporaries interpreted, how they saw and interpreted an eclipse. And so I want to use this as a means for thinking about the way in which an eclipse can be a point of access to understand world views at a particular moment in time, in this case the 17th century, and the ways in which different understandings of the world, different views of the world were coming into conflict, were coming and being contested in some way. In particular, I'm thinking about the kind of tensions that arose between traditional world views and new scientific world views that were emerging in the context of what historians refer to as the scientific revolution, a period of great scientific innovation, scientific exploration and experimentation, and a whole range of new scientific discoveries. This is the period in which we come to acquire a much greater understanding of the human circulatory system, right? This is a period in which there's much greater use of things, instruments like the telescope and the microscope, right? So all of these things are very important in this period. So this is sort of a tension. There'll be, is a tension that I want to remind you of. But let me just describe what one doctor, a guy named John Weiberd, who observed the eclipse from Carrack Fergus in Ireland. And this is what he wrote. He said, the moon, as if at that moment and unexpectedly through itself, so very nimbly between the entire path or circuit of the sun's disk, insofar as it appeared to our sight, so that it seemed to move in a circle or roll around, like a plate or upper millstone with the sun glowing or rather shimmering all around its rim or edge, right? So he's describing that very moment where the corona emerges. And there are many, many descriptions of this particular eclipse. But in some ways, what's more interesting is what precedes it. Because in the lead up to this eclipse, and people could predict eclipses, they had been able to predict eclipses for centuries with varying degrees of success. So people knew this eclipse was coming. But in that moment when the eclipse was coming, they began to speculate about what it would mean. And I wanna talk a little bit about the historical context. This is the city of London. Now, I think I've got the date wrong. I must have the date wrong here. This is a later date, because that's the St. Paul's Cathedral that gets built in the late 17th century. So I apologize. I think that is actually meant to be 1748. But at any rate, unless I can see it up there, it's not 1648. No, it is 1748. I apologize, I made an error when I typed it in. Here's the date right there, 1748. So apologies for that. But that's just an illustration. I wanna talk a little bit about the historical context for this particular moment. Now, as I mentioned before, the traditional views, the traditional understandings of eclipses that I talked about before carry through into the 17th century. They're very influential still in this period. So you still have plenty of people who believe firmly, medical practitioners who believe firmly in the theories put forward by people like Galen. And who believe, of course, in the relationship that exists, or was thought to exist, between the heavens and human bodily health. Those traditional views meant that medical astrology, and astrology generally, was actually something that was thought to be important enough that it was taught in universities, that it influenced medical thinking. It was an important part of natural philosophy, writing, and teaching in this period. It was crucial that people knew about the relationship between the heavens and earth. And as a result, there was a kind of general knowledge about astrology and about the relationship between both the condition of life on earth, the condition of human health and the human body, and the heavens themselves. So there's a kind of prevalence still of what we might think of as medical astrology, this notion that there was a link between bodily health and the movement of the stars and the planets. So this is important to keep in mind. That knowledge is imparted to people through what we might think of as almanacs. And these were almanacs that were used to predict about crops and crop health, agricultural health in general, in general, navigation, medicine, human health, the likelihood of an incidence of plague. All of those things were discussed in these almanacs. This was a very popular form of literature. In England, alone, between 350 and 400,000 almanacs were sold annually. At a point in time where literacy rates are rising, but where by no means the entire population is fully literate, right? So it sort of reflects the importance. And these were relatively cheap. They were produced pretty cheaply. So they would have been easy for people to buy. Two people and two almanacs that are listed here, they're referred to as ephemeris. And ephemeris is simply a kind of chart that documents the movement of celestial bodies, right, that's what it refers to. But you can see too, one by William Lilly, one by Nicholas Culpepper. Additions of this were both published in 1652, which is of course the year of sort of Black Monday. Now I wanted to say one other point about this. These guys are sometimes referred to as judicial astrologers. And they're referred to as judicial astrologers, not because they were using astrology to determine legal cases. In this case, the term judicial means that they were using the movement of the stars and movement of the planets to make what are referred to as prognostications, predictions essentially. And so this form of judicial astrology was a very popular form of literature in the 17th century. Two examples refer explicitly to the events that are to occur in late March of 1652, the so-called Black Monday. So this is one by William Lilly, who I just introduced there a moment ago. Ennis tenembrosis, or the dark year 1652, my Latin is terrible, so non-existent in fact. So in this case, and here's the cover of what that book looks like. Copies of these books are fairly easily found, actually in a number of libraries in North America, but also throughout the British Isles, especially at the British Library. I think these are from the Folger, I'm not sure, but it doesn't matter. You can see it's got the very typical long title that one sees in 17th and 18th century books. So it starts with the basic title and then it kind of keeps going on for multiple sentences, which is not uncommon in books, and this carries forward into the 19th century. So what did Lilly have to say in this book? Well, Lilly had a whole bunch of predictions to make at this point. Lilly said in this book that the eclipse was going to produce disputes over sea and fishing rights. He said that the eclipse was going to bring treachery perpetrated by the Dutch. He said that the eclipse was going to bring tumult and sedition to the Ottoman Empire. He said that there was going to be poverty and beggary in Scotland. He said that there would be an excess in shipwreck and piracy, and he said that the pope would die. They always say the pope's gonna die. So they always, always say the pope's gonna die. Now, if you think about that list I just read, and if you know anything about the 17th century, about history in the 17th century, these are not earth-shattering predictions by any stretch of the imagination. The English were expanding overseas using their naval power to acquire the rights over the seas, but also fishing rights throughout the North Atlantic at that point in time. So not surprisingly, there were gonna be disputes about that. The Dutch, they were fighting against the Dutch and the Dutch were always treacherous, at least in the minds of the English in the 17th century. The Ottoman Empire is always a mess or at least in this period, it's a huge mess in the 17th century and they're predicting that. No surprise that there's poverty and beggary in Scotland. The English have made sure of that for many, many centuries. In a world of imperial exploration and global trade, shipwreck and piracy were not uncommon, and the pope's always gonna die because it's always an old guy, right? So these things, and I don't mean to make light of them, but I think when you think, and this was heartfelt in the sense that people really thought that eclipses were going to lead to calamity, but in this case, understanding the prediction of calamity has to be contextualized. It has to be understood in what was happening at that moment in time because you don't make predictions that are completely untenable. They have to kind of be rooted in what's happening at that particular moment. But, of course, the long history that I've just outlined for you is informing how people interpret this particular moment, this particular episode. Culpepper has a lot of similar things to say, and I won't go into great depth here, but this is Nicholas Culpepper, equally wordy title, but a great image on the cover. I kind of love this image. And in fact, if you Google 17th century eclipses, this is the image you get, which is really interesting. It just means that this is where all the hits have gone. But he predicted similar kinds of calamities, and you can read the quote there. Good people I cannot flatter, neither can I persuade myself you will act honestly during the effects of this eclipse. So he's pretty skeptical about the people. I speak not to those in England, but generally to all those in Europe, hard tumults, murders, murders, and mutinies are threatened. Cruel massacres, the commoners are subject to be impudent and insolent against their magistrates. So all sorts of things are going on here. The world is gonna end, but the commoners are gonna be impudent and insolent against their masters, against their magistrates. So this is kind of an important point to remember and to keep in mind. So these two guys were predicting all sorts of problems, earthquakes, pestilence, massacres, the demise of nations, all of these things were going to happen at this particular moment. But there were people who came along and who critiqued what they had to say. The most famous of these critiques is this Black Monday turned white. Or the astrologer's navery epitomized being an answer to the great prognostics and so on and so forth. Also a description of the glorious effect. So it goes on in case the title wasn't long enough for you to begin with. What this anonymous author said was that the prognostications of both Lily and Culpeper did not hold true. And they didn't hold true for two reasons. One, they said that in fact, they couldn't see as much of the eclipses as they had predicted that it wasn't, they weren't fully in the path of totality. They hadn't predicted the path of totality very well. But also that none of these calamities occurred. And this author seeks to expose it. He says, and I'm not gonna read the long quote that I had initially selected, but he calls their speculations ridiculous absurdities. And he then goes on to kind of demolish them by using the ideas of rational thought, which of course become a hallmark of the late 17th and then 18th century enlightenment, which is happening throughout Europe. We see this in other places as well. Joseph Burroughs, who was a minister, delivered a sermon in 1715. And in this case, he said that the kinds of predictions, so this is jumping forward a little bit, he said that the kinds of predictions that appeared in Lily and Culpepper's work were in fact the product of superstition. And in fact, what he says, he goes further, and this is important because it's at the moment when ideas in England are starting to emerge about the differences that were thought to exist between the English and the people they were seeking to colonize at that moment. So he said, these are ideas associated with heathens, not with rational thinkers like the English. So he made this point in a sermon that he delivered. David Hume, the great philosopher known for both, as both a proponent of empiricism and skepticism, to sort of took on the issue of eclipses and what he saw as all forms of superstition with which he rejected. And he targets, among others, the astrologers who are making these kinds of predictions. Now what this reveals for us is that the discussion, the ferment, if you like, around the eclipses themselves reveals this kind of fissure, this intellectual divide, this tension that is emerging in the 17th and then in the 18th centuries where people are kind of saying, well, maybe the traditional way of understanding eclipses doesn't quite hold true any longer. Maybe this new sort of scientific, rational worldview that is taking hold in Europe, especially among the educated populations is the way to go. And that informs how people interpret these. So I use this as just an example to show how, and when we look at history, we can kind of see a whole range of issues boil or bubble to the surface when you look at something like an eclipse. So that's the point that I wanna raise about the 17th century. I wanna jump forward now as I move into the sort of final phase of the comments I've prepared and talk with you a little bit more about the 19th and early 20th centuries, early to mid 20th centuries and just sort of shift our gears a little bit. Think about another moment of historical development and how eclipses fit into that moment as a particular component of history. And in this case I want us to think about the themes of scientific exploration, increased travel, and in the case of, again, I'm focused on the areas of the world that I know particularly well, the development of empires, particularly the development of the British Empire, but also the development of the American Empire because the 19th century is the moment of westward expansion in the United States and then displacement and destruction of indigenous peoples and indigenous cultures throughout the West. So this is a kind of important issue to think about. So, and I've got three themes listed here, four themes. I've got one is thinking about eclipses as scientific opportunities or moment of exploration. Another is to think of eclipses as tourist and social opportunities, which I think has a direct bearing on what we're going to experience over the next few days. And then think a little bit more about this idea of empire, notions of cultural difference, and ideas about race. And then I'm gonna end by bringing us up to the very recent past, actually the last few years and talk about the views and traditions of Native Americans as kind of in a way of countering what I'm saying about the 19th and early 20th centuries. I also along the way want us to think about the way some of the ideas that I've been talking about persist. The way in which old and new, new conceptions and old conceptions kind of intermingle. So that's really important to think about. Okay, so let's talk through just a little bit the question of scientific expeditions. The 19th century, the period between 1860 and 1914 in particular or 1920 in particular witnesses several developments that will have an impact on how people explore and how they think about eclipses. One is that this is the moment in time when astrophysics as a scientific discipline emerges. This astrophysics is not something I pretend to know anything about as a cultural historian, but it is about using the methods of physics and chemistry to study astronomical objects and various astronomical phenomena. In this case, it's focusing more less on the movement of planets and more on the nature of their matter and the nature of the matter of stars. This moment in time is also a point when people are traveling extensively to conduct scientific experiments. The 19th century is a period of course when steamship travel and rail travel emerges making it possible for people to move quickly across distances. They can report scientific findings after the mid 19th century through the telegraph. So this is changing the way people explore the world and the way they transmit or share knowledge about the world. And then lastly, before I talk about a couple of specific examples, this is a period as I've noted of imperial expansion on the part of countries like Britain and France, but also of course the United States was as I mentioned is expanding westward. It's a period in which the British, the French and Americans are exploiting indigenous knowledge to acquire new scientific findings along the way. So there's all sorts of stuff going on to think about the kinds of inequities that one associates with processes of imperial expansion. Okay, so keep those points in mind because I wanna talk about a few specific examples. And the first is actually a really interesting example. A woman named Mariah Mitchell who lived from 1818 to 1889. She's the first female astronomer in the United States. So one can think about her as the product of some of the shifts that are occurring in the 19th century around women's access to higher education, women's access to scientific knowledge, limited access I might add. She's the first American, she's born in Nantucket and she lives the first part of her life in Nantucket. She's the first American to discover a comet using a telescope in 1847. This brought her great international fame, invitations to join exclusively male scientific or mostly male scientific societies. In 1865, she joins the newly founded Vassar College faculty as one of the first faculty members of that college where she'll teach astronomy and spend much of her career. In 1869, she along with a number of other scientists and I should say that she first observed an eclipse in Nantucket in 1831. So that was her first sort of exposure but she became fascinated with eclipses. In 1869, this is not a picture of that 1869 trip but in 1869 she traveled to Burlington, not Vermont, Burlington, Iowa along with a large number of other scientists to observe an eclipse that occurred that year. She brought a group of students and she very smartly, actually this is kind of a funny story but she very smartly sort of ignored what the men were telling her to do which was to set up her shop in the middle of Burlington, the town and she went out to the countryside where she set up her observatory with her students. Turns out that she had the right thought there because the view of the corona, she got the best glimpse of the corona there but more importantly and this was really important to her observations and those of her students, she actually witnessed the impact of the eclipse on nature. So one of the things that she notes in her discussions are the ways in which the birds fell silent. She talks about fireflies coming out, crickets chirping, dew falling, all the things that are associated with a full or a total solar eclipse. And she was able to kind of thumb her nose at the guys who were like, oh, you should have stayed in town and so there's this kind of interesting dynamic there. Now, Mariah Mitchell does, goes on a number of other scientific expeditions including one in 1878 to Colorado where there were more than a hundred prominent astronomers assembling to observe the eclipse that occurred that year and they came from around the world. She is observing in this case in a field. You can see what the setup looks like here. So you get a sense of what that setup is. She's observing in this field. This was a point in time when the best place to look at this particular eclipse was at about 14,000 feet on Pike's Peak and she didn't go up there but one American expeditionary group did and captured really great data because the view was incredibly clear. So what we get when we think about Mariah, so think about the convergence of different forces here. One is the sort of idea of the scientific expedition as a form of data collection. Another is to think about the way in which the eclipse creates opportunities for women to begin to assert a new form of knowledge and a new kind of intellectual power in this case. But also a kind of reminder of this growing scientific culture around eclipses which is really interesting. Now the British were heavily involved in these endeavors and of course I can't help but draw on British examples as a British historian. Between 1860 and 1914 the British government will sponsor some 24, 25 solar expeditions around the world. They sponsor a number of them to India where the path of totality goes and where they're likely to find if they're there at the right season. Abby knows better than anyone. Pretty clear skies, right? Where they're able to actually witness this. So we see this in a variety of different places. This is an image from 1860. These are just some observations from those moments and I wanted to just read through them. And incidentally when one studies some pretty good literature on these British expeditions, when one studies them the British couldn't do anything simply so they had these incredibly elaborate camps that they brought with them. So they would travel out to India with all of their equipment which had to be wrapped in well the 19th century equivalent of bubble wrap which was velvet. So they had to protect everything with velvet. They had to put them in crates. They had to ship them. They had to rely extensively on native or indigenous labor and indigenous knowledge about the regions. They would set up camp. They'd set up observatories. And then they'd have like a highly segmented by hierarchy camps. So you had the indigenous labor. You would have the servants who were, they brought with them from England. You would have the officers tents. And then of course you'd have, because you always need this in India is a library tent where you could have drinks and whiskey. They had a lot of whiskey that they shipped out as well because they had to spend their evenings doing that as they dissected what had happened during the day. But there's a lot of really interesting kind of cultural history around these scientific expectations that expeditions that's worth exploring. But what I wanted to point to here were just some observations. So Charles Pritchard, these are two from the 1860s. And if you read them we saw or as it were felt the mighty rush of gloom which came sweeping at an awful speed like a storm over the waters. And yet suddenly wrapping objects in an unexpected windless silence and calm. So the effects of the eclipse. The one below describes the eclipse corona and indescribably beautiful halo bearing a striking resemblance to the light which painters draw around the heads of saints. So if you think about these descriptions there's this kind of really interesting kind of connection, right? So these guys aren't abandoning totally the earlier more spiritual interpretations of eclipses in favor of a very scientific view. They're actually relying on some of that spiritual language to understand them. So there's a kind of mixture of attitudes and ideas that one sees here. OK, the last scientific expedition that I want to mention before I turn to just a couple of final ideas and then conclude is an expedition that occurs in two expeditions that occur in 1919. These were scientific expeditions where they were going to observe the eclipse, but they were going to observe eclipses with a specific goal in mind. And that specific goal in mind related to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity which posited the notion that space and motion are not absolute but are in fact relative to each other. This is a very important scientific theory that probably arguably the most important scientific theory of the 20th century. These two discoveries, these two expeditions, one occurs off the Western coast of Africa on the island of Prisimpe. The other is in Sibral, which is northeastern Brazil. These are led by a group of various British scientists. What they discover here is quite important because what they do is confirm one of Einstein's theories, which is part of his sort of general theory of relativity. And that was the theory about the bending of light rays that light rays bend as they pass large gravitational masses, sort of helping to prove the larger theory of relativity. Now in this case, this information is used to confirm that. And a lot of historians have, you can see the equipment that's used. We're getting quite sophisticated by the early 20th century in terms of that equipment. But what we're seeing here is the way in which eclipses are being harnessed to confirm new scientific discoveries, but also eclipses are actually almost agents in thinking about historical change, that the eclipse itself, the very act of observing it, helps to further, helps to promote a new way of seeing the world. So this is kind of important. So lastly, or before I have a couple of other slides, I wanted to just talk about eclipses as social and touristic or tourist and social opportunities. And I wanted to just remind you that the travel that is associated with the scientific expeditions that I mentioned was also a form of travel that people pursued as tourists. Now the woman here, Mabel Loonis Todd, who's not who, at the time that she's doing this is not too far from here. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was married to a Amherst College professor. She was also the person who transcribed and edited Emily Dickinson's poetry. So she's very important in that. Can we move the lights again? Just turn them down just a little bit more. Emily, Mabel Loonis Todd traveled with her husband extensively. She wrote herself on, wrote herself about eclipses. She published a book in 1894, Total Eclipses of the Sun, not a Total Eclipses of the Heart, but Total Eclipses of the Sun. That song is being played a lot, I think, right now, is from my understanding. But her travels took her around the world. She went to Japan twice. Unfortunately, she was super excited to see a Total Eclipses in Japan just before it was about to happen, a volcano erupted, and the ash completely obscured the sun, so they were unable to witness it. Now she had many other opportunities, including one in North Africa, in Tripoli. And she writes about this on May the 28th, 1900. She says, I doubt if the effect of witnessing a Total Eclipse ever quite passes away. The impression is singularly vivid and quieting for days and can never be wholly lost. A startling nearness to the gigantic forces of nature and their inconceivable operations seems to have been established. Personalities and towns and cities and hates and jealousies and even mundane hopes grow very small and very far away. It's quite a lovely quote, actually. But what we're seeing here is in the 19th century, and aside from these scientific expeditions, we are really seeing what we're about to witness emerging, that people are flocking to sites to observe these Total Eclipses. They're commenting on them. They're talking about them in terms that are really quite startling. And they're writing about them. Eclipses also become moments of social occasions. And I just want to talk about one other one. This is in New York City. In New York City of January 24th, 1925, very clear demarcation. In New York City of January 24th, 1925, you could see the Total Eclipse if you were north of 96th Street, if you were south of 96th Street, it was partial to varying degrees. So everyone went north. Everyone went north. And here we have an example of that. This is a picture from a Bronx park from 9-11 a.m. it occurred in the morning. It's actually quite a beautiful photograph in the New York Historical Society. It also, and I just thought this was interesting for us, it also generated an enormous amount of interest in the path of totality at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For those of you who have a connection to the university or may know, the university has canceled classes for Monday and we're allowing our students to kind of explore. And you see that here. This is a group of students, sorry, a group of students observing the eclipse here. This is from the RPI student newspaper where they talk about, hey, it's gonna be a fun day. You should definitely go and do this. And then they also make a reference to the past where in the past these would have been interpreted as signs of doom, right? And there's a sort of implication that we don't see them in that way. The New York City event is actually pretty interesting. So if you read accounts of it, the city kind of went crazy that day. People were partying all night. The well-heeled and wealthy were attending clubs and exiting into the streets in the morning, carrying champagne bottles in the news, even though it's during prohibition. So it reminds us of how relative, how relative prohibition really was. But they had boys selling little pieces of developed film so that you could look at the eclipse through the developed film. There was a general sort of spirit of partying in the streets. And so there are lots of really interesting accounts. Many of them are located at the New York Historical Society. Okay, so I wanna raise one final point and this will sort of bring me to my conclusion here. And this is something I've already referred to, but I think it's worth reminding us that when we think about the late 18th or late 19th and early 20th centuries, the difference in interpretations that people had of what eclipses meant performed or did a whole bunch of what we might think of historians might call racial work. As Europeans and white Americans tried to differentiate themselves from groups that in the racial language of the day, they saw as their social intellectual and racial inferiors. Now in this case, the first dance, I've got two examples here. One is from a white American observer. This is just a British woman who accompanied her husband and we have just an image of what was going on in one expedition to India. But her name was, well, in classic 19th century terms, Mrs. Walter Maunder, wife of the astronomer. So, but she herself actually performed astronomical work. But in the first instance, from 1878, we have one white American observer saying this about the native population, the native Indian population, the native American population. The grandest site they ever beheld, talking about the eclipse, it scared the Indians badly. Some of them threw themselves upon their knees and invoked the divine blessing. Others flung themselves flat on the ground, faced downward. Others cried and yelled in frantic excitement and terror. I'll read the other quote and then I'll say a little bit more about this. This is about India, an Indian expedition. This guy, William Christie, was, if I remember correctly, the head of the Royal Observatory in London. In 1898, they went on an expedition to India. Weren't paying a lot of attention to the fact that there was a great famine in India at that moment in time, so they weren't really commenting on the social circumstances and the economic and health circumstances at that moment. But here you see, the natives of India regarded it as a very solemn religious function, referring to the eclipse. And we were somewhat nervous as to whether our native assistants, who were high caste Brahmins, might not fall down on their knees and begin to say their prayers instead of attending to the duties they were told off to perform. I am very glad, however, to bear testimony that they performed their duties most satisfactorily and managed to reconcile duty and religion. I mentioned this as one of the things that caused some anxiety to observers during an eclipse and to show that native ideas and native prejudices must be reckoned with. Now, the work that's going on here is very complex and I can't pretend to sort of unpack it all for you. But what I want you to keep in mind is the notion that when one thinks about eclipses in this context, in this case, white Americans and British, we're using it as an opportunity to kind of privilege the forms of knowledge, the ways of seeing the world that they possessed over more traditional views or views associated, in this case, with India and with native North Americans in particularly the American West. So it was kind of a positioning, a kind of power play, if you like, that was part of this larger process of imperial expansion, but also this wider process of trying to delineate racial difference, to kind of do that in ways that were cultural. Now, this point is important to bear in mind as I kind of end with my concluding slide because it's this history, it's this history that women like this, Samira Crank, who's part of the Dine Nation and works for an organization called the Bears Ear Partnership in Southern Utah, I think it's Southern Utah. What we see in the early 21st century is an attempt not to define one form of knowledge as superior to another, but to talk about different ways of seeing the world, different ways of seeing eclipses as kind of being able to coexist. In 2017, when an eclipse, a total eclipse occurred in the Navajo Nation, which is quite expansive, the Navajo Nation, rather than letting people in, decided to close its borders to eclipse chasers. They closed their schools, they encouraged people, instead of observing this as a spectacle, thinking about it as a solemn moment, and, and this is a quote, to keep stillness in their homes and not partake of food and water, thinking about it as a spiritual moment, a moment of reflection, right? And not give in to the kind of spectacle that eclipse chasers had started to embrace. Now, this woman, Samira Clark, in 2023, again, she's a member of the Dene Nation and the director of the Bears Ear Partnership in Southeast Utah, the Dene Nation didn't close that. They encouraged people to come and to participate in the observation of the eclipse respectfully, but to do so in a way that was mindful of the indigenous meanings, the indigenous understandings that attached to the eclipse. And what, one of the things that she argued is that people should be careful about posting images on social media without warnings. And she argued that this was important because in the Dene tradition and in some other Native American traditions, viewing an eclipse directly might be a cause for spiritual disharmony, right? So she wanted people to be conscious of the different sorts of meanings that are attached to eclipses and to be respectful of the traditions of, in this case, the Dene. So I think it's just kind of an interesting way to end this set of historical reflections about eclipses and the myriad meanings that are attached to them. So just as a final couple of points here before I take a few questions, one of the things that should be clear, I think from this is the notion that eclipses are and the meanings that are attached to them are historically and culturally relative, right? They depend on time and place and they depend on cultural backgrounds. They depend on particular moments, particular forms of knowledge that exist. The second point is the natural phenomena, as I think I hope I've illustrated, can function sometimes as historical actors in and of themselves, right? We don't, they don't have human agency in the way that human beings do, but they can certainly promote historical change and serve a vital role in thinking about historical narratives. So that's another point to keep in mind. The third point is that we probably need to resist the temptation to either judge or dismiss how one group views or understands natural phenomena, to understand that there are a variety of approaches and perspectives and then we need to maybe understand the context out of which those occur and appear. So I hope that some of these reflections will just give you something to think about as we prepare for Monday. Hopefully give you a moment or two to contemplate historical meaning and to think about the new kinds of meanings that we might attach to eclipses in the wake of what's about to happen. So thank you all for listening. I appreciate it. I'm sorry about the timing at the beginning. We weren't quite sure if it said six or six 30, but it seems to have worked out. Maybe we can turn the lights back up. If that's okay. Can we turn the lights back up? Thanks. I'm happy to take any questions that people have. I won't pretend to know all the answers. I don't. This is sort of a march through time and place and space and ideas, but any questions? Yeah, please. They're able to predict in the ancient world, right? And it's simply what you would expect the sort of old sort of navigation of the skies charting the movement of stars in relation to the movement of the earth. So they're actually able to do it for a very long period of time. They become more precise over time and then they apply new scientific instruments to make the determinations even more precise. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they had a pretty good sense. That doesn't mean that everyone knew, right? So people could be surprised. And it was those moments of surprise that often led to a sense of kind of foreboding or great fear, right? Right, right. So it's a form of knowledge that, you know, people had to have access to these Almanacs that were predicting them. It becomes more systematized and more regularized. Like in the United States, there's something called the nautical Almanac service, I think is what it's called. And they begin to produce books that are more accurate in the 19th century. Yeah, Abby, yeah. They did, they did, they did. The Kings were also, it was also predicted. I think with the Pope, it partly had something, I mean, at least from the 16th and 17th century stuff that I read, or the histories of those periods, it partly had to do with their ability to function as patrons of court astrologers and the degree to which it was appropriate for the Pope to have an astrologer in the Vatican, right? So I think there was that sort of, there was a tension around that. And I think, so maybe it was that sort of idea that this wasn't quite right for these guys to be doing that led to those tensions, but yeah, they predicted Kings would do it, that would die all the time based on that. Yeah, please. Every, everybody online can hear as well. Yeah, yeah, I'll go back here, sorry. In medical astronomy, what sorts of bodily harm was predicted to befall you as a result of an eclipse? Yeah, that's a really good point. It was usually, in the context of what I was talking about in the 17th century, the most likely thing to befall was a plague. And that is of course very easy to predict because from, I mean, there have been moments of plague throughout, and I'll use the European example, throughout the European continent, throughout its history, but since the middle part of the 14th century, there were periodic outbreaks of the plague that occurred. And that was highly feared because there weren't really any cures for it. You could live through it, but many people didn't. And in England, one guy was actually, we got really lucky. So he predicted that there would be a great plague in England in 1665 in accordance with an eclipse that occurred that year. And there was, in fact, a great plague that killed many people in London and elsewhere, but especially in London. But it was plague. It was sores and ulcers on the body that were often thought. It was fever. It's a fever infection in some way. It would be disorders of the blood would also be brought out as things that people were suffering as a result of. And then fire was always predicted, but which is not, of course, directly related to the body, but could have a great impact on the body. But fire was easy to predict in European cities at this point because many of them were subjected to periodic fires given the relative lack of standards around building and the use of timber, that kind of thing. But lots of other, lots of, any number of ailments could emerge. Yeah, please. I guess, speaking on ailments, I mean, one of the things that's been so widely broadcast is about, use your glasses, don't sustain eye damage, don't look at the sun directly. Did you come across reportings or instances of people who were having ocular damage in that that was seen as being sort of something from the gods or that it was caused not just by the sun itself? I'm teased to teaching, I apologize. I didn't run across a lot of that in my research. By the 19th century, they're using devices to look at the sun without looking at it directly, so figuring out ways to do that. And they're actually doing that in earlier periods of time. My hunch is that yes, there were people who actually were suffered ocular damage as a result, but I didn't run across a lot of it. And I will say that if I did much greater detailed research on this, I actually delving into the archives myself rather than reading what other historians have written about it. I might discover that, but it's an interesting thing to explore, especially, and I think people would have attributed all sorts of otherworldly reasons for going blind as a result. Any other questions for me? Happy to answer them or end. Yeah, one more, I guess. You shed a lot of great light on just cultural perspectives throughout history and historical examples of different perspectives on an eclipse. And I was just curious, maybe, more of what you're willing to share in terms of your personal perspective on the significance of the eclipse. And you know what I mean? Just kind of like how you're viewing it or in this moment in time and maybe personally. Yeah, ooh, personally. I think I've mostly thought about it in a flippant answer, it's like, oh, damn, I have to write this lecture about the eclipses. That was the first thing that occurred to me. And then I started to think, oh, am I gonna drive to campus that day to think about mobility? And that's sort of something that's really interesting. But as I read the material and started reading the descriptions of eclipses, I started to think, hmm, I have never witnessed a total solar eclipse in my life, not that I recall. I do recall a lunar eclipse when I was a kid where the moon, to me, seemed impossibly large. And it was Halloween, actually, it was Halloween. I remember driving back and it was probably dressed as a tiger, because I think I was a tiger for like eight years running. So I think I'm curious to see if I have a similarly emotional response to what I witnessed that day. I'm also really curious to see how my dogs respond. I'm really curious about that. And so I'm intrigued by the kind of relationship between nature and this thing that's happening that's not supposed to happen and that will be disruptive. So I think I'm thinking of it in those terms. And then I think the other thing that I've thought about in doing this research and thought about as I reflect on what might happen on Monday is just trying to put myself in the minds of people in the past and try to understand how they might have conceptualized something that they didn't fully understand or grasp and had little knowledge of and little access to information about. So that's sort of something that I think occurs to me. But yeah, I'll be curious to see how I respond on Monday. Thanks, that's a good question. So we thought about the eclipse in a very historical lens, a scientific lens and a religious or spiritual lens. It seems that we're starting to examine the eclipse in a commercial or capitalist way. Have you observed any history of this trend, if it's recent or if there have been episodes of feeling that without the eclipse? There have been fairs associated with eclipses for a very long time. People gathering to observe, to celebrate, to monitor them. That picture I showed of Vienna in 1842 gives you a sense of that kind of fair-like atmosphere. But that occurred prior to the 19th century. It's just that in the 19th century, we see kind of the 18th and 19th centuries, we see the emergence of what we normally associate with sort of modern or contemporary commercial consumer cultures. And so you see the emergence of, particularly social gatherings that where people are kind of consuming food and consuming drink and doing those other things. And then the production, you start to see the production of what we might think of as kind of commercial kits, people buying souvenirs of the event. And those souvenirs exist in much earlier periods as well. Yeah, it has become, it's a commercial opportunity. In this region, restaurants are opening, they're extending their hours. We've seen some questionable behavior maybe around the kinds of money that people can make around renting rooms and doing those kinds of things. So I think any event that is out of the ordinary in sort of the contemporary Western world almost always gets commercialized in some way. So I think we're seeing that at this moment too. Yeah, that's a good question. Gabe, you came, thanks for coming. I was interested in, you mentioned in the British explorers trip to India that the Indian people that were working for them were very solemn and would fall to the ground. In your research, did you find any details about why they thought that or what they might have been thinking? I didn't actually do anything about what the actual belief systems are. Abby, do you know anything about that? Abby is my colleague and a historian of India. So, right, it's crucial to Hinduism, right? So I think that might be the connection but beyond that, Gabe, I'm sorry, I don't know the answer. I wish I did. What it actually meant. Right, what it actually meant. Yeah, thank you. Sure, all right. Do I see any other questions? If not, then let's give our speaker a warm thank you. Thank you for coming on a Friday night, listening to me drone on about history for an hour. So, thanks.