GOODSPEED HISTORIES
New Jersey History and Genealogy
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Home
  • About
  • Families
  • Localities
  • Index of Articles
  • Contact

Why Read History?

April 22, 2010 By Marfy Goodspeed in Uncategorized Tags: thoughts

Just read a fascinating article by Walter Russell Mead on “A Lifetime Reading List.” It inspired me to reflect on why we read books and why some of us love history. Mead points out that:

“World history is so complex and multifaceted that a great danger is that young readers will give up on making any kind of sense out of it.  Dozens of civilizations, scores of powers, religions and cultures rising and falling everywhere you look, uncountable throngs of significant schools of art, more battles and wars than you can shake a stick at: getting things in chronological order is the best and perhaps the only way to help young people find their footing in the torrent.”

And not only young people.
You can read the full article here.

“The Learned and Intelligent Dr. Daniel Coxe”

April 20, 2010 By Marfy Goodspeed in West New Jersey Tags: Daniel Coxe, England

A treatise published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions by Georgii Wedelii on Volatile Salts in 1673 was followed by a notice from the editor, which read:

“So much of this Author; whose way not being here made out and declared, we hope, a Learned and very known Member of the R. Society, Doctor Daniel Coxe, will shortly supply the world with that defect, he being certainly and experimentally master of a sure and easy way of extracting the volatile Salt out of all sorts of Plants.”

Continue reading »

The “Inquisitive” Dr. Coxe

April 14, 2010 By Marfy Goodspeed in West New Jersey Tags: Daniel Coxe, England

That is how Dr. Daniel Coxe was described in 1670 by Christopher Merrett in a pamphlet on the “Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries.”

It appears I have gotten my chronology wrong. The last post on Dr. Daniel Coxe concerned his early medical career, which began in 1669, when he was licensed at Cambridge to practice medicine. It had been my impression that Coxe was a medical man first, and a scientist second. But I now realize that his scientific experiments pre-dated his medical profession.

Continue reading »
«‹ 179 180 181 182›»

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Stockton & Anderson, continued
  • Anderson v. Stockton
  • County House, Part Five
  • The Stewarts of Flemington
  • The Freeholders’ Surprise
  • A Tavern & A Courthouse
  • The County House
  • Larason’s Tavern
  • Pittstown Inn, part 3
  • Pittstown Inn, part two
GOODSPEED HISTORIES
  • Home
  • About
© GOODSPEED HISTORIES 2026
Powered by WordPress • Themify WordPress Themes

↑ Back to top