Secondary Source

Although the `Great Debate' is important to different people for different reasons, it is a clear example of humanity once again striving to find its place within the cosmic order. In the debate, Shapley and Curtis truly argued over the ``Scale of the Universe," as the debate's title suggests. Curtis argued that the Universe is composed of many galaxies like our own, which had been identified by astronomers of his time as ``spiral nebulae". Shapley argued that these ``spiral nebulae" were just nearby gas clouds, and that the Universe was composed of only one big Galaxy. In Shapley's model, our Sun was far from the center of this Great Universe/Galaxy. In contrast, Curtis placed our Sun near the center of our relatively small Galaxy. Although the fine points of the debate were more numerous and more complicated, each scientist disagreed with the other on these crucial points.

How the Shaman Stole the Moon (Bantam 1991) is my archaeoastronomy book, a dozen ways of predicting eclipses -- those paleolithic strategies for winning fame and fortune by convincing people that you're (ahem) on speaking terms with whoever runs the heavens

In 1822 Gideon Mantell, a doctor from Lewes, East Sussex, described a fossil tooth which his wife had found by the side of the road in Cuckfield, West Sussex. This tooth was the first dinosaur fossil in the world ever to be found and identified. For the very first time people realised creatures as large as dinosaurs had once existed

In 1864 thousands of Chinese in Kwantung Province were recruited by Central Pacific Railroad Co. to work on the western portion of transcontinental railroad. The roadbed was blasted out of the solid rock mountainside in the fall of 1865 by lowering Chinese workers (also known as "Celestials" after the "Celestial Kingdom" as these tireless workers referred to their homeland) on ropes down the sheer cliff face. These Chinese men drilled and packed black power charges in the rock, lit the fuses, and had the agility to scamper up the ropes before the explosions. Cape Horn, Sierra Nevada Mountains, California.

From the beginning of IT-history, a great deal of the IT key-solutions have been reaching worldwide market from California's Silicon Valley. There are several different approaches to describe this general IT-tendency.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, high schools were political and cultural battlegrounds. Gael Graham's article uses conflicts over boys' long hair to trace the connections between the desire for personal autonomy and the quest for power and participation among public high school students. Centering her narrative on the legal battles between Chesley Karr, a male high school student in El Paso, Texas, and school officials in that city, Graham sheds light on the high school student rights movement and the public debate about long hair. This installment of "Teaching the JAH " gives students the opportunity to explore the legal issues of the Karr case as well as the broader question of high school student rights.

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A complete history of computing would include a multitude of diverse devices such as the ancient Chinese abacus, the Jacquard loom (1805) and Charles Babbage's ``analytical engine'' (1834). It would also include discussion of mechanical, analog and digital computing architectures.

The Medieval Technology Pages are an attempt to provide accurate, referenced information on technological innovation and related subjects in western Europe during the Middle Ages. There are several ways to access this information. The most direct method is through the Subject Index which provides direct access to all the technology pages. Many of the articles are also present in a historical Timeline. And material can be found by examining the References which back-reference all articles through the sources used.

Lunar Exploration Timeline