Another - an adventuresome female astronomer - fought to prove that science was not anathema to femininity. An “enthralling” (Daniel Kevles) and magnificent portrayal of America’s dawn as a scientific superpower, American Eclipse depicts a young nation that looked to the skies to reveal its towering ambition and expose its latent genius.In the scorching summer of 1878, with the Gilded Age in its infancy, three tenacious and brilliant scientists raced to Wyoming and Colorado to observe a rare total solar eclipse. With spellbinding accounts of train robberies and Indian skirmishes, the mythologized age of the Wild West comes alive as never before.

history” (Scientific American), award-winning writer David Baron brings to three-dimensional life these competitors-the planet-hunter James Craig Watson, pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell, and the ambitious young inventor Thomas Edison-to thrillingly re-create the fierce jockeying of nineteenth-century American astronomy. Dedicating years of “exhaustive research to reconstruct a remarkable chapter of U.S. Lauded as a “sweeping, compelling” (Wall Street Journal) work of science history, American Eclipse tells the story of the three tenacious and brilliant scientists who raced to Wyoming and Colorado to observe the rare event. 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. 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.

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 “suspenseful narrative history” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR) brings to life the momentous eclipse that enthralled a nation and thrust American science onto the world stage.

Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Yearįinalist for the Colorado Book Award (Nonfiction)īooklist Editors’ Choice (Science & Technology) Winner of the AIP Science Communication AwardĪn Amazon Best Book of the Year (Science)Ī St. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing

American eclipse baron