The Royal Society and the British Atlantic World

Thursday 30 September - Friday 1 October, 2010
The Royal Society, London

A two-day international conference organised by Joyce Chaplin and Mordechai Feingold for the Royal Society Centre for History of Science, with the generous support of the Sackler Foundation.

Programme

Thursday 30 September

9.30am Registration and coffee

10.15am Welcome

Session I. Chaired by Lisa Jardine, Queen Mary, University of London
10.30am Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University
What was American about Early American Science?

11.30am Walt Woodward, University of Connecticut
John Winthrop, Jr. and the Nature of Knowledge in an early Colonial Setting.

12.30pm Lunch

Session II. Chaired by William Poole, Oxford University
1.30pm William Newman, Indiana University
The Exchange of Chymical Knowledge between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century.

2.30pm Kathleen Murphy, California Polytechnic State University
To Make Florida Answer to Its Name: John Ellis, the Royal Society, and the Cultivation of Empire.

3.30pm Tea and coffee

Session III. Chaired by William Poole
4.00pm Chris Baxfield, University of Leeds
'Little of Philosophical Information . . . and yet how Evangelical!' Cotton Mather, Christology and the
Royal Society, 1714 - 1724.

5.00pm John Dixon, City University of New York
William Burnet, FRS: Science and Scripture Prophecy in Early Eighteenth-Century Europe and America.

6.00pm Close

7.00pm Conference dinner


2
Friday 1 October

9.00am Registration and coffee

Session IV. Chaired by Richard Drayton, King's College London
9.30am Sarah Schechner, Harvard University
Politics and the Dimensions of the Solar System: John Winthrop's Observations of the Transit of Venus.

10.30am Tofigh Heidarzadeh, Huntington Library
The Emergence of Observational Astronomy in Colonial America.

11.30am Tea and coffee

Session V. Chaired by Richard Drayton
12.00pm John Christie, Universities of Leeds and Oxford
The Time and the Place: American Chemistry in the Late Colonial and Revolutionary Periods.

1.00pm Lunch

Session VI. Chaired by Michael Hunter, Birkbeck College, University of London
2.00pm Jennifer Thomas, Queen Mary, University of London
‘This very valuable present’: The significance of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s donations to the Royal
Society 1770-75.

3.00pm Mordechai Feingold, California Institute of Technology
Amateurs: Historical Reflections on the Advent of Science in Britain and the American Colonies.

4.00pm Tea and coffee

Session VI. Chaired by Michael Hunter
4.30pm Concluding remarks and general discussion

5.30pm Close