Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers (eBook)

How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life

Tamara Plakins Thornton (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016
416 Seiten
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
978-1-4696-2694-9 (ISBN)

Infos

In this engagingly written biography, Tamara Plakins Thornton delves into the life and work of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), a man Thomas Jefferson once called a "e;meteor in the hemisphere."e; Bowditch was a mathematician, astronomer, navigator, seafarer, and business executive whose Enlightenment-inspired perspectives shaped nineteenth-century capitalism while transforming American life more broadly. Enthralled with the precision and certainty of numbers and the unerring regularity of the physical universe, Bowditch operated and represented some of New England's most powerful institutionsfrom financial corporations to Harvard Collegeas clockwork mechanisms. By examining Bowditch's pathbreaking approaches to institutions, as well as the political and social controversies they provoked, Thornton's biography sheds new light on the rise of capitalism, American science, and social elites in the early republic.Fleshing out the multiple careers of Nathaniel Bowditch, this book is at once a lively biography, a window into the birth of bureaucracy, and a portrait of patrician life, giving us a broader, more-nuanced understanding of how powerful capitalists operated during this era and how the emerging quantitative sciences shaped the modern experience.

Autor

Tamara Plakins Thornton is professor of history at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.2.2016
• Zusatzinfo: 19 halftones, notes, bibl., index
• Verlagsort: Chapel Hill
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 160 x 160 mm
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Mathematik ► Geschichte der Mathematik
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
• Schlagworte: Actuaries • American Academy of Arts and Sciences • American carrying trade • American Revolution • Astronomy at Harvard • Astronomy in the early republic • Benjamin Pierce • Blank forms • Bookkeeping in early America • Boston Athenaeum • Boston Brahmins • Bowditch family • Caroline Plummer • Celestial Navigation • Charitable trusts • Charles Babbage • Comets in America • Comets, meteors, and eclipses in America • Commercial Insurance Company • Daniel Appleton White • Dudley Leavitt Pickman • East India Marine Society • East India trade • Ebenezer Francis • Eclipses in America • Edmund Blunt • Edward Everett • Elias Hasket Derby • Enlightenment science • Essex Bank of Salem • Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company • Family trusts • Federalism in Massachusetts • Foreign members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh • Foreign members of the Royal Society of London • Francis Calley Gray • Gentility in colonial America • George Baron • George Ticknor • Harvard corporation • Harvard honorary degrees • Harvard library • Harvard University history • Henry Ingersoll Bowditch • Henry Pickering • history of boston • history of capitalism • History of celestial navigation • History of corporations • History of elites in America • History of Harvard • History of insurance • History of Life insurance • History of Marine insurance • History of office technologies • History of quantitative science • History of science in America • History of trust funds • Hollis chair of mathematics and natural philosophy • Ingersoll family • Israel Thorndike • John Hamilton Moore • John Pickering • John Thornton Kirkland • Jonathan Ingersoll • Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch • Joseph Story • Learned societies in the early republic • Library cataloging systems • longitude • Marine insurance • Maritime History • Mary Ingersoll Bowditch • Mary Somerville • Mascarene Islands • Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company • Massachusetts privateers • Mathematics at Harvard • Mathematics in the early republic • Meteors in America • Mortgage loans • napoleonic wars • Nathaniel Bowditch • Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch • navigation tables • New American Practical Navigator • Newburyport, Massachusetts • new england history • Office paperwork organization • Pierre Simon de Laplace • Privateers in the American Revolution • Privateers in the Napoleonic Wars • Privateers in the War of 1812 • Robert Adrain • Rumford Medal • Salem Athenaeum • Salem, Massachusetts • Salem Philosophical Library • Samuel Mcintire • Simon Forrester • Social elites in the American republic • Social hierarchy in colonial America • Social hierarchy in the early republic • Testamentary trusts • Trading voyages to Madeira • Trading voyages to Manila • Trading voyages to Spain • Trading voyages to Sumatra • Trust companies • Voyages to Ile de Bourbon • Voyages to Reunion • War of 1812 • War of 1812 in Salem • William Bentley • William Ingersoll Bowditch • William Shaw Smith
• ISBN-10: 1-4696-2694-2 / 1469626942
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4696-2694-9 / 9781469626949