Edwin Rose talks about Joseph Banks and Georg Forster, naturalists on the Cook expeditions, and how political ideas shaped the way these specimens were understood back in Europe. Rose is completing a PhD. in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and will soon be the Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library and a research fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. He’s the author of “Publishing Nature in the Age of Revolutions: Joseph...

Babak Ashrafi and Jessica Linker talk to me about my book The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent. Ashrafi and Linker produced this interview for the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. You can find podcasts, video lectures, and other materials at the Consortium website CHSTM.org. Thanks to Tyler Putman, Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi, and Nicholas Barron for contributing questions to the interview. Learn more about your ad...

Steven Johnson talks about the British pirate Henry Every and his improbable capture of the Mughal treasure ship, Gunsway. Johnson is the author of twelve books including Enemy of All Mankind, Farsighted, Where Good Ideas Come From, and The Ghost Map. He’s also the host of the PBS series How We Got To Now and the podcast American Innovations.

Antony Adler talks about the history of ocean science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Adler is a Research Associate in the History Department at Carleton College. He’s the author of Neptune’s Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea.

David Kaiser talks about the history of twentieth-century physics and the forces that have shaped it as a scientific discipline. Kaiser is a Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he also serves as a Professor of Physics. He’s the author of Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World.

Benjamin Hopkins talks about the concept of the frontier: how it exists on the map but also as a set of practices used by colonial states around the world. Hopkins is an associate professor of history at George Washington University. He’s the author of Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State.

Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees talk about the voyage of the Vrouw Maria and the long quest to find the wreck in the waters of the Archipelago Sea off the coast of Finland. Easter is a professor of history at Boston College. Vorhees is a travel writer for Lonely Planet with an expertise in Russia, New England, and Central America. They are the authors of The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure: Catherine the Great, a Golden Age Masterpiece, and a Legendary Shipwreck.

Erika Fatland talks about her long journey through the Central Asian republics and the legacy of Soviet influence there. Fatland is the author of many books and essays including Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel talks about black women writers, decolonization, and travel. Joseph-Gabriel is an assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She’s the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire.

Erika Fatland talks about her long journey through the Central Asian republics and the legacy of Soviet influence there. Fatland is the author of many books and essays including Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Al Zambone talks with me about American polar exploration, the origin of Time to Eat the Dogs, and the history of science as an academic discipline. Zambone is the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. He’s the author of Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life. You can hear an extended version of this interview on the Historically Thinking podcast, available on most podcast platforms as well as online at historicallythinking.org.

Emmanuel Iduma talks about his experiences traveling through Africa and his quest to find a new language of travel. Iduma is a writer and lecturer at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His stories and essays have been published in Best American Travel Writing 2020 and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of A Stranger’s Pose, which was a finalist for the Ondaatje Prize in 2019.

Lachlan Fleetwood talks about debates about altitude sickness in the Himalaya and the ways these debates became tied up with ideas about the physiology of Europeans and Himalayans in the 1800s. Fleetwood is the author of “Bodies in High Places: Exploration, Altitude Sickness, and the Problem of Bodily Comparison in the Himalaya, 1800-50,” published in the journal Itinerario 43, no. 3 (2019): 489-515.

Alexander Rose talks about the history of airplanes and airships at the turn of the century, a time when the direction of aviation remained unclear. Rose is the author of 'Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World.'

Kate Hollander talks about Bertolt Brecht’s life and work. She also talks about the community of artists who were his friends, lovers, and collaborators. Hollander is a historian of modern Europe. She’s also the author of a book of poems, My German Dictionary, which was awarded the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize by USA Poet Laureate Charles Wright.

Emma Kowal talks about the history of biospecimen collection among the aboriginal peoples of Australia. Kowal is a cultural and medical anthropologist at Deakin University. She’s the co-author, along with Joanna Radin, of "Indigenous Biospecimen Collections and the Cryopolitics of Frozen Life," published in the Journal of Sociology.

Bathsheba Demuth talks about the history and exploration of the Bering Strait, from the early 1800s to the present day. Demuth is Assistant Professor of History & Environment and Society at Brown University. She’s the author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait.

Eric Zuelow talks about the origins of tourism from the era of the European Grand Tour through the twenty-first century where is has become – until the current pandemic at least – the largest service sector industry in the world. Zuelow is a professor of European History at the University of New England. He’s the author of A History of Modern Tourism.

Rebecca Priestley talks about her journeys to Antarctica and the process of bringing them to life in her writing. Priestley is an associate professor at the Centre for Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She is the author of Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica which was recently longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Eric Berger talks about the sudden departure of Doug Loverro, the head of human space flight at NASA, only days before the agency sends astronauts into space after almost a decade. Berger is the Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica.

Paige Madison talks about recent discoveries at the Liang Bua cave where researchers are trying to understand the complicated story of the hominin Homo Floresiensis. Madison is a PhD candidate in the history of science at Arizona State University where she also works with The Center for Biology and Society and the Institute of Human Origins. She writes about paleoanthropology at the blog Fossil History. She recently wrote about her trip for National Geographic and Scientific American.

Novelist Amity Gaige talks about her book Sea Wife. Gaige is a Fulbright and Guggenheim fellow. Her novel Schroder was one of the New York Times Best Books for 2013. A review and excerpt of Sea Wife can be read in the New York Times Book Review.

Dr. Namrata Goswami talks about the Chinese space program and its ambitious plans for lunar exploration. Goswami is a strategic analyst on space and great power politics. She’s the author of many books and articles including Great Powers and Resource Nationalism in Space soon to be published by Lexington Press.

Hanne Nielsen talks about the challenges facing women who work in Antarctica. Nielsen is a Lecturer in Antarctic Law and Governance at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) in Hobart, Tasmania. She’s the co-author, along with Meredith Nash, of “Gendered Power Relations and Sexual Harassment in Antarctic Science in the Age of #Me Too,” due out this year in Australian Feminist Studies.

Kim Walker talks about the history and science of cinchona bark as a tonic, medicine, and mixer. Walker is a biocultural historian completing her PhD work on the Cinchona Bark Collection at Kew Gardens. She’s the co-author (along with Mark Nesbitt) of Just The Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water.