Voices of the New Republic: Essayists’ Biographies

HOWARD R. LAMAR, Editor

CAROLYN C. COOPER, Associate Editor

 

 

TOBY A. APPEL is Historical Librarian at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University, and a research affiliate in the Section of History of Medicine, Yale University. She holds a Ph.D. in history of science from Princeton University and a M.L.S. from the University of Maryland. Before coming to Yale, she taught history of science and history of medicine at New York University, University of Maryland, and University of Florida. Her writings include, besides numerous contributions to edited books and journals, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987) and Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945-1975 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000). She is currently researching medical sects, societies, and the state in nineteenth-century Connecticut.

 

RICHARD BUEL is Professor of History Emeritus at Wesleyan University, where he taught for 40 years. He is the author of Securing the Revolution (1972); of Dear Liberty (1980); with Joy D. Buel, of The Way of Duty (1984); and of In Irons: Britain’s Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy (1998). He was educated at Amherst College and Harvard University and has been the recipient of several fellowships, including one from the Guggenheim Foundation, two from the American Council of Learned Societies, and two from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently a member of the Connecticut State Historical Commission and the Connecticut Humanities Council.

 

GRETCHEN TOWNSEND BUGGELN is Director of the Research Fellowship Program, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and Associate Professor in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. She is interested in the material culture of Americans past and present, particularly those artifacts that reflect and shape religious belief and practice. Her 1995 Yale Ph.D. dissertation was a study of the religious architecture of Connecticut’s Protestant in the early national period. Revised, it will be published by the University Press of New England in 2003 as Temples of Grace: the Material Transformation of Connecticut’s Churches, 1790-1840.

 

TIM W. CLARK is a Professor Adjunct in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (FES) and a Fellow in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University. He is also Board President of the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative in Jackson, Wyoming. His major interests are in applied conservation, analysis and organizational behavior in the natural resources arena, and analysis and development of policies and programs for conservation of species and ecosystems. He has investigated more than thirty mammal species (marsupials, insectivores, rodents, carnivores, ungulates, primates) in ten states and three foreign countries, mostly with a “single species” approach, and mostly with threatened and endangered species in recent years. His 1997 book, Averting Extinction: Reconstructing Endangered Species Recovery, uses as a case study his experiences with the endangered black-footed ferret recovery program.

 

CHRISTOPHER COLLIER, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, is Connecticut State Historian. He has written extensively about the history of Connecticut for both scholarly and popular readers. Among his works are Roger Sherman’s Connecticut: Yankee Politics and the American Revolution and The Literature of Connecticut History, an annotated bibliography of some four thousand published works. More recently he has published scholarly articles on the Connecticut town in The New England Quarterly, “Sleeping with Ghosts: Myth and Public Policy in Connecticut, 1634-1992;” and in the Bulletin of the Connecticut Historical Society, “New England Specter: Town and State in Connecticut History, Law, and Myth.” Collier earned a B.A. at Clark University and a Ph. D at Columbia.

 

EDWARD S. COOKE, JR., the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts and Chair of Yale University’s Department of the History of Art, received his B.A. from Yale College (1977), his M.A. from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware (1979) and his Ph.D. in 1983 from Boston University. His research interest is American material culture, especially furniture and its makers. His book Making Furniture in Pre-industrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut received the Charles F. Montgomery Prize when it was published in 1996. He has curated collections, fostered museum exhibits and spoken from coast to coast on varied manifestations of craftsmanship. He has contributed dozens of articles to books and journals in the two decades between writing “Domestic Space in the Federal-Period Inventories of Salem Merchants,” in 1980 and “From Manual Training to Freewheeling Craft: The Transformation of Wood Turning, 1900-1976” in 2001.

 

KATHY J. COOKE received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and currently is a member of the History Department of Quinnipiac University. She was a Fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University 1998-99. Her research speciality is the history of breeding in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is completing projects on American eugenics and feminism, and on the history of agricultural breed associations.

 

CAROLYN C. COOPER, research affiliate in Yale University’s Economics Department, is an historian of technology. Her doctoral dissertation (Yale 1985) won the Allan Nevins Prize of the Economic History Association in 1986. Her book, Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard’s Machinery and Patent Management in 19th-Century America appeared in 1991. She has enjoyed fellowships at the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. and at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. She studies the historical relation of patenting to invention and has guest-edited a special issue (Oct. 1991) of Technology and Culture on that topic. Her shorter works pertinent to the early American republic include contributions to Windows on the Works: Industry on the Eli Whitney Site 1798-1979 (1984); to Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from, the Colonial Era to 1850 (1994); and to a special issue (1988) of IA, the Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology on the Springfield Armory. She currently collaborates in a forthcoming book about the industrial heritage of New Haven.

 

BRUCE C. DANIELS, Professor and Chair, Department of History, Texas Tech University, is author of several books including: The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635-1790 (1979) and Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (1995, 1996). A former Peace Corps volunteer (Bihar, India, 1964-65) and Fulbright scholar (Duke University, 1993-94), Daniels also served as editor of the Canadian Review of American Studies (1978-86) and president of the Canadian Association for American Studies (1991-93). In 1996, Daniels was a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the New Hampshire Primary where he finished 7th in a field of 22 Democratic Party candidates.

 

ROBERT B. GORDON, Professor of Geophysics and Applied Mechanics at Yale University, received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Yale. He taught at Columbia University before joining the Yale faculty in 1957. Gordon’s research is published in 129 papers in refereed journals, including 54 in archaeometallurgy and the history of technology. He is the author or co-author of eight books, the most recent being The Texture of Industry, an Archaeological View of the Industrialization of North America (with Patrick M. Malone, 1994); and American Iron 1607-1990 (1996); Industrial Heritage in Northwest Connecticut, a Guide to History and Archaeology (with Michael Raber, 2000); and A Landscape Transformed (2001). He was a fellow at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, in 1988-99, and Regents’ Fellow at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, in 1991. He received the Abbott Payson Usher Prize from the Society for the History of Technology in 1991, and the Norton Prize from the Society for Industrial Archeology in 1984 (shared), 1986 (shared), and 1997.

 

PETER P. HINKS is Assistant Professor of American History at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He is also the Associate Editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers. He is the author of To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance, which in 1998 received the Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Currently, Professor Hinks is researching and writing on slavery, emancipation, and race in Connecticut between 1750 and 1850.

 

HOLLY V. IZARD is research historian at Worcester Historical Museum and formerly a research historian at Old Sturbridge Village. She holds a Ph.D. in American and New England Studies from Boston University (1996), and for many years has been studying New England society, economy, culture, and material life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on the microanalysis level of individuals and their communities. Articles of which she is author or co-author, about early nineteenth-century New England farming and farming households, have appeared in The Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 103 (1993), Agricultural History 65 (Summer 1991), and Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 1986 (1988).

 

DAVID W. KLING (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1985) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is the author of A Field of Divine Wonders: The New Divinity and Village Revivals in Northwestern Connecticut, 1792-1822 (1993), which was awarded the Kenneth Scott Latourette Prize in Religion and Modern History. He has published articles in the Journal of Men’s Studies, Religion and American Culture, and the History of Education Quarterly. His book, The Bible in History: How the Texts Have Shaped the Times will be published by Oxford University Press.

 

HOWARD R. LAMAR received his doctorate from Yale University in 1951. He taught at Yale from 1949, serving as William Robertson Coe Professor of American History and Sterling Professor of American History until his retirement in 1994. He is the author of Dakota Territory, 1861-1889 (1956, reprinted 1997), and The Far Southwest, 1846-1912 (1966, revised and reprinted 2000). Among his many editing credits is The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West (1977), which has been revised and published as the New Encyclopedia of the American West (1998). Although his special fields are frontier and western American history, he has long maintained an interest in Connecticut history, having served as Alderman of the City of New Haven, 1951-1953. He has taught courses on nineteenth-century New Haven history and given papers on the role of the Dutch in Connecticut history. He was a member of the Connecticut Humanities Council, 1987-1992, and organized a three-day symposium on the history of Grove Street Cemetery on the occasion of its two-hundredth anniversary (1998).

 

JILL E. MARTIN, Professor of Legal Studies and Chair of the Legal Studies Department at Quinnipiac University, received her B.A. at Keuka College in 1977, J.D. at Albany Law School, Union University in 1980, and M.A. at Yale University in 1990. Her professional specialties are paralegal education and the history of Native Americans’ legal status. Her articles on these subjects have appeared in the Journal of Paralegal Education and Practice (1987), Journal of the West (1990, 2000), Western Legal History (1990, 1995), Connecticut Lawyer (1992), and American Indian Law Review (1998). Her 1990 article “ ‘Neither Fish, Flesh, Fowl, nor Good Red Herring’: The Citizenship Status of American Indians, 1830-1924” has been chosen for reprinting in American Indians and U.S. Politics: A Companion Reader, edited by John Meyer (2002).

 

GEORGE McLEAN MILNE, retired minister in the United Church of Christ, studied at St. Andrews University in Scotland, received a B.S. from University of Massachusetts in 1937 and B.D. and M.Div. from Yale Divinity School in 1940. He served in the U.S. Navy 1943-1946. With interests bridging religion, history, and environmental conservation, he has extended his pastorate from parishes in Hebron/Gilead, (1940-1952) and Woodbridge (1952-1979) to the forests of Connecticut, as member and past president of the Connecticut Forest and Park Association. He is the author of Ongoing Pilgrimage (1972), Twenty-Five Years in Woodbridge (1977), A Year of Parish Prayers (1979), Lebanon: Three Centuries in a Connecticut Hilltop Town (1986), and Connecticut Woodlands (1995).

 

RUTH BARNES MOYNIHAN is an historian and writer on American and women’s history. She studied at Smith College and later earned her B.A. at the University of Connecticut, and her Ph.D. in 1979 from Yale University. Her work includes a biography of Oregon’s Abigail Scott Duniway, Rebel for Rights (1983), and a museum exhibition essay, Coming of Age: Four Centuries of Connecticut Women (1989). She also co-edited So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier (2nd edition, 1998) and the two-volume Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women from 1540 to 1993 (1993). Mother of seven children, and a lifelong resident of Connecticut, she is currently working on a multi-generational history of a Connecticut family.

 

WILLIAM A. NIERING died August 30, 1999, having completed writing his essay for this volume. He was Lucretia L. Allyn Professor of Botany at Connecticut College, Director of the Connecticut Arboretum 1965-1988 and Research Director of the Connecticut College Arboretum 1988-1999. He studied biology and botany at Pennsylvania State College (B.S.1948 and M.S. 1950) and at Rutgers University earned his Ph.D. in botany and plant ecology in 1952. A member of the Ecological Society of America, the Botanical Society of America and of Connecticut, the Society of Wetland Scientists, the Explorers Club, the Connecticut Forest and Park Association and other professional societies, he wrote many reviews and articles on botany and ecology in his almost fifty-year scientific career. He is also author of The Life of the Marsh: the North American Wetlands (1966), A Book of Wildflowers (1984), and the Audubon Society Nature Guide, Wetlands (1985); and co-author of The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers-Eastern Region (1979) and Wetlands of North America (1991).

 

WILLIAM N. PETERSON, the Senior Curator at Mystic Seaport Museum, earned his B.A. in history at Eastern Connecticut State College and has done graduate work at the University of Rhode Island. He has lectured and written extensively about the Connecticut maritime experience including articles detailing the history of the southeastern Connecticut menhaden fishery, the ship carvers at Mystic, Connecticut, and the New London Jibboom Club, a nineteenth century seamen’s fraternal organization. His Mystic Built: Ships and Shipyards of the Mystic River, Connecticut 1784-1919 received the prestigious John Lyman Book Award from the North American Society of Oceanic Historians (NASOH), for the best book published in American maritime history in 1989. He co-authored the book Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum, published in 1996, which received an Award of Merit from the Connecticut League of Historical Organizations. He contributed to Boats: A Manual for Their Documentation, published by the American Association for State and Local History, and to the highly acclaimed book America and the Sea: A Maritime History, published in 1998. He was the Historical Advisor and contributing writer for Connecticut Public Television and the Connecticut Humanities Councils collaborative documentary entitled “Connecticut and the Sea,” which received the Wilbur Cross Award in1990.

 

BRIAN J. SKINNER has conducted geological research and teaching at Yale University since 1966, and was named Higgins Professor of Geology and Geophysics in 1972. He received his B.Sc. (Hon.) at the University of Adelaide in Australia in 1950, and Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1955. Before coming to Yale he taught at the University of Adelaide and did research in geology, geochemistry and mineralogy at the U.S. Geological Survey in Washington, D.C. He was editor of the journal Economic Geology from 1969 to 1995 and editor or co-editor of six books, including The Oxford Companion to the Earth (2000). Author or co-author of over ninety articles in scientific journals and books, he also wrote Earth Resources, which appeared in six languages in three editions from 1969 to 1986, and collaborated in writing a dozen other books, including Geology Today: Understanding our Planet (1999, second edition in press) and The Dynamic Earth (first edition 1989, fourth 2000), which has provided the basis for six audio-visual presentations in the “Great Teachers Series” of the Association of Yale Alumni.

 

H. CATHERINE W. SKINNER is research affiliate and lecturer at Yale University in the Department of Geology and Geophysics and in orthopaedics and rehabilitation at the Medical School. Following college at Mt. Holyoke (B.A. 1952), she pursued graduate education at Radcliffe/Harvard (M.A. 1954) and the University of Adelaide in Australia (Ph.D. 1959). Her research and teaching specialty is minerals and mineralization as found in biological systems and related to normal growth, development, and disease in human beings. She has been appointed visiting professor at Harvard, Cornell, University of Adelaide and Stanford, and has served as president and publications chairman of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to over sixty published papers, her writings include co-authorship of Asbestos and other Fibrous Material: Mineralogy, Crystal Chemistry and Health Effects (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988) and of Dana’s New Mineralogy, 8th edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997) and co-editorship of three collected works in her field, the most recent being Geology and Health: Closing the Gap (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).

 

CAROLINE FULLER SLOAT graduated from Mount Holyoke College and immediately went on to take a M.A. in history at the University of Connecticut. For the next twenty-five years, she was employed by Old Sturbridge Village as a research historian and in progressively more responsible positions in connection with the museum’s publications and interpretation to the visiting public. As historian, she researched and wrote about many topics in early nineteenth-century rural life: storekeeping and rural economics, household furnishings and domestic life, to suggest the broad areas of the museum’s demonstrations and interpretations. She served as editor of the members’ magazine, Old Sturbridge Visitor from 1980 to 1993, researched and produced the Old Sturbridge Village Cookbook (1884, second edition 1994), and also edited and contributed to Meet Your Neighbors-New England Portraits, Painters, and Society, 1790-1850 (1992), and Clockmaking in New England, 1750-1850 (1993), two Old Sturbridge Village publications. Since 1993, Caroline Sloat has been employed at the American Antiquarian Society, where she is currently director of scholarly programs.

 

HARVEY R. SMITH, a wildlife biologist with over thirty years of research experience, began his career with the U.S. Forest Service in 1966 studying predators of the gypsy moth. He received a M.F.S. degree in wildlife biology from the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 1972. He is recognized internationally for his biotelemetry research on the effects of intraperitoneal transmitter implantation on small mammal behavior and somatic growth, effects of exploitation on the population dynamics of muskrats, and the role of predation in forest pest dynamics. He has served as a member of three scientific delegations that visited the former Soviet Union between 1986 and 1990 to study the role of vertebrates as predators of pest insects and their role in forest protection management. Prior to his retirement in 2001, his major research focus was on small mammal habitat associations.

 

ROBERT M. THORSON holds a joint appointment in the Department of Geology and Geophysics and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where he has taught since his arrival from Alaska in 1984. Within the geosciences, his current interests lie in the tectonic geomorphology and paleoseismology of glaciated regions, and in the environmental impacts of development in Latin America. His current archaeological interests in the historical landscapes of New England, which lie hidden beneath retransported soils and second growth forest, and whose salient manifestations are stone walls, has prompted him to write a scientific summary of this work, Stone By Stone, (New York, Walker & Company, 2002). It reached the hardcover, regional bestseller list for September, 2002, but he considers his greatest honor to be a letter received from the Washington State Geological Survey in February, 2000, which requested a better copy of his dissertation, because the old one had become worn out. As a Fulbright Scholar during the 1998-1999 academic year, he lectured widely in Chile while working with their national geological survey. Other visiting academic appointments have been in Civil Engineering (Universidad Tecnica de Federico Santa Maria, Valparaiso; 1999), Geography (Dartmouth College; 1992), and History (Yale University, 1991). He lives with his family in Storrs, Connecticut. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, and the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

DANIEL VICKERS, Professor in the Department of History at the University of California in San Diego, received his B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1975 and his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1981. He formerly taught at the University of Wyoming (1983-84) and the Memorial University of Newfoundland (1984-99). A member of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, he studies work, especially farming and fishing, in the colonial and early national periods of American social history. He has contributed articles on these subjects to the Journal of American History (1985), the William and Mary Quarterly (1983, 1990, 1993) and to essay collections edited by others: Seventeenth Century New England (1984), and Work and Labor in Early America (1988). His book Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 appeared in 1994.

 

PAUL EDWARD WAGGONER was born and educated in Iowa, a descendent of people who had farmed in that state from its early days. In 1951 he began work at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in Haven, researching plants and their pests, soil and water. From 1972 to1987 he directed the Station, which is a child of Yale and first in the Western hemisphere. Directing the Station during its Centennial in 1975 gave him an affinity for history, and working on Connecticut farms and forests more than 40 years taught him the character of its stones and soils.

 

 

Volume I: What They Said ISBN 1-878508-24-5 

493 pp., cloth, 8.5 x 11, illus., $31.95

 

Volume II: What We Think ISBN 1-878508-25-3 

338 pp., cloth, 8.5 x 11, illus., $31.95