Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

"Insufferably Stupid Or Miserably Out Of Place": F.A.P. Barnard And His Scientific Instrument Collection In The Antebellum South, Stephen Case

Faculty Scholarship – Geology

In the 1850s, the American scientist and educator Frederick A. P. Barnard created a collection of scientific apparatus at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, of a size and expense that surpassed any collection in the United States at that time. The collection, which would come to include over three hundred instruments of both American and European manufacture, was the attempt by Barnard, born and educated in the North, to bring Big Science to the South and challenge the dominance of Northern schools in science education. In this respect it failed, and the collection became a forgotten footnote in …