Margaret Jacob

Last updated
Margaret C. Jacob
Born1943 (age 8081)
NationalityAmerican
OccupationHistorian
Academic background
Education St. Joseph's College (B.A.)
Cornell University (M.A., Ph.D)

Margaret Candee Jacob (born 1943) is an American historian of science and Distinguished Professor of Research at UCLA. She specializes in the history of science, knowledge, the Enlightenment and Freemasonry.

Contents

Life

Margaret C. Jacob was born (1943) and raised in New York City. She graduated from St. Joseph's College in 1964 with a B.A. degree and then attended Cornell University, earning a master's degree in 1966 and her Ph.D. two years later. Jacob was appointed as an assistant professor at the University of South Florida in 1968 and spent 1969–71 as a lecturer in history at the University of East Anglia. She was hired as faculty at Baruch College of the City University of New York in 1971 and received tenure four years later. Jacob was appointed professor of history at the New School for Social Research in 1985 and simultaneously became dean of its Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts until 1988. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and co-authored a textbook on Western Civilization that has gone through five editions. She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern History , Restoration, Journal of British Studies , Isis , and Eighteenth-Century Studies . "Best known for her studies of Isaac Newton and the development of Western scientific thought, Jacob has also written about the politics of writing history." [1]

Works

Books

1970–1999

  • The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720, Cornell University Press and Harvester Press, Ltd., 1976. Reviewed in New York Review of Books, December 7, 1978. Italian translation, I Newtoniani e la rivoluzione inglese, 1689-I720, 1980 by Feltrinelli Editore, Milan. Reprinted, 1983; Japanese translation, 1990. Available from Gordon and Breach, "Classics in the History of Science."
  • The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans, published by George Allen & Unwin, London and Boston,1981; Italian translation, L'Illuminismo Radicale, published by Societa Editrice Il Mulino,1983. Second edition, revised, Cornerstone Books, 2005
  • The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution, Alfred Knopf, sold to McGraw-Hill, New York, 1988, 273 pp. Reviewed New York Review of Books, April 28, 1988; Italian translation, Einaudi Editore, 1992.
  • Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth Century Europe, 1991, 350pp. Oxford University Press; reviewed TLS, June 12, 1992; AHR, 1993; JMH, 1994; Italian rights bought by Laterza. French translation appeared in 2004 with L'Orient, Paris.
  • Telling the Truth about History with Lynn Hunt and Joyce Appleby, New York, W.W.Norton, 1994. Reviewed New York Times Book Review, March 25, 1994. TLS, June 10, 1994; The New Republic, Oct. 24, 1994; editions in Spanish, Polish, Lithuanian and Chinese under contract. A selection of the History Book Club. Forums on the book in History and Theory and the Journal of the History of Ideas.
  • Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism, with Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs. Jacob's half discusses Newtonian mechanics and European industrial culture throughout the 18th century. Humanity Press, 1995. Winner of the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize, History of Science Society.

2000–2023

  • The Enlightenment: A Brief History of Documents. Bedford Books. 2001. 237 pages. ISBN   978-0312237011. 2nd ed. 2016
  • The Enlightenment: A Brief History, Bedford Books, 2001.
  • With Lynn Hunt and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book that Changed Europe, Harvard University Press, 2010 reviewed New York Review of Books, June 25, 2010. TBD
  • Janet Burke & Margaret Jacob, Les premières francs-maçonnes au siècle des Lumières, Bordeaux University Press, 2010. 190pp, avec un cahier de 8 illustrations en couleur.
  • with Lynn Hunt and Wijnand Mijnhardt, eds. Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion. Getty Publications, 2010 TBD
  • Jacob, Margaret; Crow, Matthew (2014). "Freemasonry and the Enlightenment". In Bodgan, Henrik; Snoek, Jan A. M. (eds.). Handbook of Freemasonry. Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion. Vol. 8. Leiden: Brill Publishers. pp. 100–116. doi:10.1163/9789004273122_008. ISBN   978-90-04-21833-8. ISSN   1874-6691.
  • edited with Catherine Secretan, In Praise of Ordinary People. Early Modern Britain and the Dutch Republic, 2014 http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=711782
  • The First Knowledge Economy. Human Capital and Economic Development, 1750–1850. Cambridge University Press. 2014. 257 pages. Reviewed by , [2] Lissa Roberts, [3] Pat Hudson, [4] and FV Razumenko. [5]
  • “How Radical Was the Enlightenment? What Do We Mean by 'Radical'?" in Justyna Miklaszewska, and Anna Tomeszewska, Filozofia Oświecenia. Radykalizm – religia – kosmopolityzm, University Press, Jagiellonia, 2016, translated as “Ja bardzo radykalne bylo Oświecenie i co oznacza “radikakne?”, pp. 46–64.
  • The Secular Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press. 2019. 360 pages. ISBN   978-0691161327.
  • The Scientific Revolution: A Brief History with Documents, Bedford Books, 2010. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, published by Oxford University Press; 1997, a sequel to The Cultural Meaning; new edition planned for 2010, with additional chapters with Catherine Secretan, eds.
  • The Origins of Freemasonry. Facts and Fictions, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
  • Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
  • The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008
  • Freemasonry and Civil Society: Europe, the Americas, North and South , with Maria Vasquez (Peter Lang, 2023)

Journal articles

Awards

Notes

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Freemasonry</span> Group of fraternal organizations

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Age of Enlightenment</span> 17th- to 18th-century European cultural movement

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scottish Enlightenment</span> Intellectual movement in 18th–19th century Scotland

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<i>Encyclopédie</i> General encyclopedia published in France from 1751 to 1772

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Early modern Europe</span>

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Freethought is an unorthodox attitude or belief.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Progress</span> Movement towards a refined, improved, or otherwise desired state

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The Republic of Letters was the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment, or philosophes as they were called in France. The Republic of Letters emerged in the 17th century as a self-proclaimed community of scholars and literary figures that stretched across national boundaries but respected differences in language and culture. These communities that transcended national boundaries formed the basis of a metaphysical Republic. Because of societal constraints on women, the Republic of Letters consisted mostly of men.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Newtonianism</span> Philosophical principle of applying Newtons methods in a variety of fields

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<i>Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism</i> 1797–98 book by Abbé Augustin Barruel

Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism is a book by Abbé Augustin Barruel, a French Jesuit priest. It was written and published in French in 1797–98, and translated into English in 1799.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atheism during the Age of Enlightenment</span>

Atheism, as defined by the entry in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, is "the opinion of those who deny the existence of a God in the world. The simple ignorance of God doesn't constitute atheism. To be charged with the odious title of atheism one must have the notion of God and reject it." In the period of the Enlightenment, avowed and open atheism was made possible by the advance of religious toleration, but was also far from encouraged.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Midlands Enlightenment</span> Regional English cultural and scientific movement

The Midlands Enlightenment, also known as the West Midlands Enlightenment or the Birmingham Enlightenment, was a scientific, economic, political, cultural and legal manifestation of the Age of Enlightenment that developed in Birmingham and the wider English Midlands during the second half of the eighteenth century.

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The ideas of the Spanish Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, science, practicality, clarity rather than obscurantism, and secularism, were transmitted from France to the New World in the eighteenth century, following the establishment of the Bourbon monarchy in Spain. In Spanish America, the ideas of the Enlightenment affected educated elites in major urban centers, especially Mexico City, Lima, and Guatemala, where there were universities founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In these centers of learning, American-born Spanish intellectuals were already participants in intellectual and scientific discourse, with Spanish American universities increasingly anti-scholastic and opposed to “untested authority” even before the Spanish Bourbons came to power. The best studied is the University of San Carlos Guatemala, founded in 1676.

The Gottschalk Prize is awarded for an outstanding historical or critical study on the 18th century and carries a prize of US$1,000. It is named in honour of Louis Gottschalk (1899–1975), second President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), President of the American Historical Association, and for many years Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. His scholarship exemplified the humanistic ideals that this award is meant to encourage.

References

  1. Scanlon & Cosner, pp. 118–19
  2. Gráda, Cormac Ó. (2016). "Did Science Cause the Industrial Revolution?". Journal of Economic Literature. 54 (1): 224–239. doi:10.1257/jel.54.1.224. hdl: 10197/6385 . JSTOR   43932447.
  3. Roberts, Lissa (2015). "Margaret C. Jacob. The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850 . Ix + 257 pp., illus., bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. £19.99 (Paper)". Isis. 106 (2): 456–457. doi:10.1086/682787.
  4. Hudson, Pat (2016). "The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850 . By Margaret C. Jacob. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. X+257. $85.00 (Cloth); $29.99 (Paper); $24.00 (Adobe eBook Reader)". The Journal of Modern History. 88 (3): 646–647. doi:10.1086/687425.
  5. Razumenko, Fedir V. (2016). "The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850 by Margaret C. Jacob (Review)". Canadian Journal of History. 51 (2): 365–367. doi:10.3138/cjh.ach.51.2.rev08. S2CID   151898087.
  6. "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-10-11.
  7. "Margaret Candee Jacob". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2021-10-11.
  8. "Six professors named 2019 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science". UCLA. Retrieved 2021-10-11.