Abstract
Science journalist David Baron deliberately chose an auspicious year for a book about the 22 July 1878 solar eclipse. Like many readers, I suspect, my own experience chasing the more recent “Great American Eclipse” of 19 August 2017, deepened my appreciation of the phenomenological significance of total solar eclipses. It also better prepared me to recognize Baron’s achievement in vividly chronicling one of the most notable historical predecessors for a well-documented total solar eclipse that crossed the United States. Similar in its trajectory, but shifted clockwise from the 2017 eclipse, the path of totality for Baron’s 1878 eclipse extended from the northern Rocky Mountains to the Gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana. Readers of American Eclipse are rewarded with a lively, well-researched historical narrative, which is presented effectively for a wider public audience.
Baron interweaves three primary storylines in American Eclipse, viz., the eclipse preparations and travels of Vassar College astronomer Maria Mitchell (allowing him to engage productively with women’s participation in science in the Gilded Age), the ambitious astronomer James Craig Watson (zealous seeker of new asteroids and planets) and the famed inventor Thomas Edison. By focusing on these three narratives, along with a suite of minor characters, Baron portrays the eclipse as a “coming out” moment for American science, concentrating on the experiences of well-known and distinguished easterners travelling westward rather than embedding the narrative more firmly in the human and environmental setting of the American West itself. Such a focus, while by no means exclusive, permits an evocative and detailed narration of events, given the abundance of primary source materials for these intertwined narratives, including US government documents, scientific and popular periodicals, and the papers of the book’s main protagonists, as well as those of many of their colleagues, rivals, and collaborators. Most of the action takes place either in the eastern (or Midwestern) places from which these scientific travellers came, or in the central part of the path of totality within the United States, mainly in southern Wyoming and central Colorado, which were the easiest sites to reach by railroad in 1878.
Although Baron anchors his account almost entirely in an impressive, wide array of primary sources, he does engage with and credit a few secondary works, though mainly confined to those that pertain directly to his topic and characters. This is not a book aimed at an academic audience and it lacks any extensive engagement in wider scholarly debates in the history of science and technology. The overarching historical themes that Baron does broach revolve mainly around how the 1878 eclipse contributed to the rise of American science, despite the main characters’ most publicized achievements fizzling out afterward, whether Edison’s tasimeter to measure heat coming from long distance or Watson’s claim to have found new planets within the orbit of Mercury. Such an interpretive framework fits better with an older generation of historiography (which he does reference), such as the work of Robert Bruce and Hunter Dupree. That said, the book is clearly intended for a wider public audience, to engage present-day eclipse enthusiasts – or, “umbraphiles,” among whom Baron counts himself – in the past; in that goal it succeeds spectacularly in conveying the texture and excitement of eclipse travel and observation in the Gilded Age. Along the way, it also conveys some rich historical material for future use by scholars about gender relations in science, the practice and organization of eclipse work, and public science in the late nineteenth century.
Beyond all that, historians of science should enjoy this book just as others in the wider public will, as a gripping story told by a seasoned writer. Grounded deeply in primary source evidence, which is cited and discussed at the end of the book, American Eclipse also serves as an exemplar of well-crafted and soundly researched history of science for a popular audience. Notwithstanding the book’s hyperbolic title, historians of science who hope to reach a wider audience may well use this as a model for combining lively writing with serious research. And, who knows, perhaps someone in the next century will write an equally engaging sequel about the “Great American Eclipse” of 2017.