Genius Overcome: The Destruction of Catherine de Parthenay
The life of Catherine de Parthenay (1554-1631) was dominated by national religious conflict and her decision to take a pivotal role of resistance at the all-co...
Dale DeBakcsy
Maria Winkelmann And The Guilded Age Of Astronomy
Back in the age when historians favored hard and fast lines between different Eras of world history, 1543 stood as the gold standard boundary between the Old w...
Champion Of Chinese Heliocentrism: How Wang Zhenyi Went From Horseback Martial Artist To Stellar Mathematician
An arrow hits a target as a fifteen year old girl on a horse goes galloping victoriously by. It is not an unusual sight in late eighteenth century China ...
Kepler, For the People: Maria Cunitz’s Urania Propitia And The Popularization Of Heliocentrism
When Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) rewrote our conception of how heavenly bodies move by replacing the ideal and eternal circles of classical philosophy with ell...
The Life Stories Of Birds: How Margaret Morse Nice Ended Ornithology’s Long List Era
When you headed out into the field as a 19th century ornithologist, you had one of two things in mind as to what constituted your profession: (1) to look for b...
Return To Nature: Stella Brewer And The Science Of Chimpanzee Rehabilitation
Our interactions with our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the chimpanzees, have rarely been entirely honorable. We dress them up in amusing hats, teac...
Geology For The Future: Marcia Bjornerud And The Stories That Rocks May Tell
Scientific education in the United States has been characterized in the last two decades by a dizzying program of modernization and experimentation. An average...
“Bordering on the Marvellous”: The Astronomical Menagerie of Williamina Paton Fleming
When William Huggins became the first human to examine the spectrum of a star in 1864, he could little have imagined the magnitude of the project he had brough...
The Plant Matriarch Of The Pacific Slope: Sara Plummer Lemmon
For thirty years, from the sweltering deserts of Arizona to the mountainous forests of Northern California, there traipsed a duo of botanists, broken in health...
Dale DeBakcsy
Dale DeBakcsy is the writer and artist of the Women In Science and Cartoon History of Humanism columns, and has, since 2007, co-written the webcomic Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable Comedy with Geoffrey Schaeffer. He is also a regular contributor to The Freethinker, Philosophy Now, Free Inquiry, and Skeptical Inquirer. He studied intellectual history at Stanford and UC Berkeley before becoming a teacher of mathematics and drawer of historical frippery.