Rebecca Ortenberg

"I like to joke that one of the reasons I decided to study history is that it was unlikely to involve very much math. So when Dot Porter started to tell me about manuscript collation formulas, I got worried. Formulas? That sounds pretty math-y to me." 

"According to Sarah Reidell, the Penn Libraries’ Margy E. Meyerson Head of Conservation, the mural does more than evoke the natural world: it is intimately and continuously affected by it. 'Seasonally, we’ve seen changes. It expands. It gets heavier [in the summer]. Then it contracts when it’s less humid in the winter months.' "

"Caroline Schimmel’s efforts are one part of a larger project to make visible the stories of women who lurk below the traditional historical record--women who wrote behind pseudonyms, or who collaborated anonymously with male relatives, or who contributed to larger scientific, political, or creative projects in ways that were deemed unsubstantial or unimportant until recently."

"Yet many historians, including multiple biographers, still assert that Barry was a woman who tricked everyone. This emphasis on the gender Barry was assigned at birth and fascination with his so-called subterfuge parallel the ways trans people are often discussed outside of history books."

"If the question implied by the book’s title is 'Can we hack our way to a more just and inclusive society?', then the answer Dunbar-Hester offers is, 'Unfortunately, no.' "

"When we come across blatant sexism in the historical record, it’s easy to dismiss its importance by saying, 'Well, that’s just how it was back then.' But the messages conveyed in these documents—and so many others like them—have had long-term consequences." 

"In a city like Philadelphia, audiences can learn about science through a variety of institutions and a plethora of activities. But public audiences have fewer opportunities to talk with each other about how history and culture inform science and what it means to them. Through programs like History Lab, the Science History Institute offers unique, transformative opportunities to do just that."

"[Emily Graslie] herself is eager to point out that there are many prominent women science communicators but that they remain frustratingly invisible to too many people. In a statement pinned to the top of her Twitter profile, she pointedly observes, 'I get an email every day from someone saying they don’t know any female science communicators. Please. We’re here.' "

"Dax’s queer sensibility is both self-assured and searching; it brands her as a person apart and provides her with a community that spans space and time. Like so many of the queer kids watching her, she must define herself outside usual boundaries - a process both terrifying and freeing."

"Television has not always been kind to older women characters, but there does seem to be change in the air of late... [the Netflix comedy] Grace and Frankie is feminist in many of the same way that Call the Midwife is, especially in taking seriously the interiority of older women, and the right they have to control their own lives."

"The promise of manned spaceflight encouraged men and women to dream of life among the stars, but fashions reminded them that even in that high-tech future, gender roles would maintain their Jetsons’-like traditionality. Engineers like my grandparents played a role in shaping both sides of post-World War II society, though only one of them was ever called an engineer in life."

"But what frustrated me most was not the foolishness of Nature’s arguments; it was the familiarity of that foolishness. With its gestures towards the importance of history to public understanding and its pleas for contextualization, Nature’s editorial board sounded a lot like...historians."