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A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World
Liveright
June 2017
On Sale: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 1631490168
EAN: 9781631490163
Kindle: B01MAX6COT
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
On a scorching July afternoon in 1878, at the dawn of the
Gilded Age, the moon’s shadow descended on the American
West, darkening skies from Montana Territory to Texas. This
rare celestial event―a total solar eclipse―offered a
priceless opportunity to solve some of the solar system’s
most enduring riddles, and it prompted a clutch of
enterprising scientists to brave the wild frontier in a
grueling race to the Rocky Mountains. Acclaimed science
journalist David Baron, long fascinated by eclipses,
re-creates this epic tale of ambition, failure, and glory in
a narrative that reveals as much about the historical
trajectory of a striving young nation as it does about those
scant three minutes when the blue sky blackened and stars
appeared in mid-afternoon. In vibrant historical detail, American Eclipse animates the
fierce jockeying that came to dominate late
nineteenth-century American astronomy, bringing to life the
challenges faced by three of the most determined eclipse
chasers who participated in this adventure. James Craig
Watson, virtually forgotten in the twenty-first century, was
in his day a renowned asteroid hunter who fantasized about
becoming a Gilded Age Galileo. Hauling a telescope, a star
chart, and his long-suffering wife out west, Watson believed
that he would discover Vulcan, a hypothesized
"intra-Mercurial" planet hidden in the sun’s brilliance. No less determined was Vassar astronomer Maria Mitchell,
who in an era when women’s education came under fierce
attack fought to demonstrate that science and higher
learning were not anathema to femininity. Despite obstacles
erected by the male-dominated astronomical community, an
indifferent government, and careless porters, Mitchell
courageously charged west with a contingent of female
students intent on observing the transcendent phenomenon for
themselves. Finally, Thomas Edison a young inventor and
irrepressible showman braved the wilderness to prove
himself to the scientific community. Armed with his newest
invention, the tasimeter, and pursued at each stop by
throngs of reporters, Edison sought to leverage the eclipse
to cement his place in history. What he learned on the
frontier, in fact, would help him illuminate the world. With memorable accounts of train robberies and Indian
skirmishes, David Baron’s page-turning drama refracts
nineteenth-century science through the mythologized age of
the Wild West, revealing a history no less fierce and
fantastical.
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