iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

250 years ago today, Thomas Jefferson…bought a thermometer. And he recorded Philadelphia’s highest temperature that day: 76 degrees. Today’s heat-dome, climate-change high is 99.

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

One year later, it’s another big box of books day (paperback edition)

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

Ah, Harvard colleagues—raise a taco with me tomorrow

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Benjamin Franklin, born on this day 1706: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

It was wonderful to talk Tom Paine and climate change last night—thank you @theitps.bsky.social and @noraslonimsky.bsky.social !

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

First day of the semester, first day of a new class, a freshman seminar on “Moby-Dick,” the novel and its significance for the history of resource extraction: “wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

The first anti-vaxxers worried that the original vaccine, which used cowpox against smallpox, would turn them into cows, a bizarre fear depicted here by caricaturist James Gillray—today is his day.

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

Your annual reminder of science’s foundational role in US history: on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was first publicly read, in Philadelphia, from a platform originally built for astronomers to observe the 1769 Transit of Venus—science was the literal platform for revolution

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

“This splendid account offers a rich new perspective on the origins of climate science”—wow, and thank you @publisherswkly.bsky.social for the starred review of my new book on the FRANKLIN STOVE

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Delighted to find my new book briefly noted @newyorker.com which, in about 100 words, gets the book exactly right

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

“America runs on RESISTANCE”—Senator Ed Markey says in Boston, at the Massachusetts #HandsOff demonstration, where gazillions of people are still showing up, despite the rain

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

For #WomensHistoryMonth: Mary Norris, an early American woman of #science, loaned her telescope to Philadelphia’s observation of the 1769 Transit of Venus (part of an international astronomical effort). Norris was formidable—John Adams said that if she’d been his wife, “I should have shot myself”

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

There’s a lot going on right now…but I want to take time to thank @harvardbookstore.bsky.social for hosting an event for my FRANKLIN STOVE book and my wonderful colleague @agr.bsky.social for her expert comments and discussion leading into the Q&A—the book is in the wild!

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Today, on the anniversary of Harvard being named for John Harvard (#otd 1639), we are rallying at Harvard to defend all places of higher education in the United States

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Eric Williams, CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY, on the modern history of profiting financially from exploitation and human suffering, is one of the most important books I read in grad school, and I’m passing on the favor in my grad seminar today

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

On Boston Common, below the historic State House, today was a beautiful day to #StandUpForScience (but it’s beautiful to do that any day)

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Benjamin Franklin produced the very first chart of the Gulf Stream and then two more charts of it—here’s the final one, of 1786, showing Dr. Franklin in the lower right-hand corner, lecturing poor old Neptune, behind whom is the source of the Gulf Stream: the Gulf of Mexico

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

The Philadelphia Eagles were named, in 1933, to honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, part of the New Deal—the NRA’s Blue Eagle stood for protection of labor and federal oversight of the U.S. economy (pic: Library of Congress)

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

I am grateful and amazed to get such early, generous praise for my #FranklinStove book from the likes of @amitav.bsky.social @kawulf.bsky.social @charlescmann.bsky.social Alan Taylor, Stacy Schiff, and Philip Deloria. Pinching myself

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Never trust a book by its cover—unless it’s designed by the insanely brilliant Na Kim #FranklinStove

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Who cares about the #WHO? Everyone who’s been free of smallpox since 1980, when the WHO declared victory in its global vaccination campaign to eradicate the deadly disease, at a cost of $300 million, saving the world an estimated $1 billion (and massive misery) every year ever since

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

RIP David Lynch, whose cartoon, “The Angriest Dog in the World,” helped get me through at least a couple of years in grad school

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

Spotted my forthcoming #FranklinStove book in the @fsgbooks.bsky.social display @historians.org meeting—not quite in the wild, but getting closer…

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

If you’re in search of a good New Year’s resolution, or maybe 13 of them, look no further than the list of virtues Benjamin Franklin, aged 20, set out for himself to achieve moral perfection

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Atop the White House, Jimmy Carter—first POTUS to promote a transition to alternative energy—shows off the solar panels installed there in 1979 (removed by a subsequent administration in 1986)

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Please enjoy this shot of Elvis getting a polio shot backstage at the Ed Sullivan show as part of a pro-vaccination campaign in 1956, posted here today for no reason whatsoever

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Page 326 in forthcoming book on Franklin stove...

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

There were two transits of Venus across the Sun in the 19th century, the second #onthisday in 1882. The US Congress joined international scientific observation of the two events, funding no fewer than eight expeditions; to commemorate the transit of 1882, John Philip Sousa wrote a march (obviously)

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Corn Hill / 1620: this small square stone in Truro, Cape Cod, marks the spot where the Pilgrims stole seed corn from a Native cache, planted it, and thus had a harvest for which they gave thanks a year later

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

A feast—like ordering dinner from a famous chef, knowing it’ll be good, not realizing how completely fabulous it will be

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Knowledge is power—this small pocket compass, made in Philadelphia in 1803, is now in the Smithsonian’s collections of scientific instruments because it made it all the way to the Pacific and back with Lewis and Clark, probably the most consequential land surveyors in U.S. history

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

There’s only one surviving document signed by the first four US presidents (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison) and it’s a 1793 subscription list, now at the American Philosophical Society, raising funds for André Michaux’s botanical expedition—remarkable proof of early US support of science

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

Hello new followers from that bleak gray place! Reposting my first post on this site: a cyanometer, the instrument Alexander von Humboldt (among others) used to determine how blue any sky actually was

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 22/10/2024

“A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard”—it’s Moby-Dick week in my maritime studies class

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 26/09/2024

I was just telling a graduate student that my office hours aren’t only for undergrads, anyone is welcome to drop in, and moments later, Remy the famous Harvard cat did just that

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 24/09/2024

It was an immigrant who settled in Pennsylvania, Pierre Eugene Simitiere, who suggested the motto that still appears on the Great Seal of the United States, “E Pluribus Unum,” out of many, one

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 15/09/2024

Not mine but I think you know where they live

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 13/09/2024

Sharing some early fall pictures of the small hill on the Harvard Business School campus that my students replanted to increase urban biodiversity, with some closeups of happy pollinators

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 01/09/2024

A sky blue Morpho menelaus butterfly, native to Brazil, to welcome the people from Brazil now on Bluesky

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 04/07/2024

#OnThisDay in 1776, Thomas Jefferson…bought a new thermometer. And he recorded the high in Philadelphia that day: 76 degrees Fahrenheit. The high in Philadelphia today is expected to be 91.

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 15/04/2024

New mug, suitable for the most bitter of brews

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

Greetings! Since I’m a historian of science, I thought my first post in this space should celebrate the cyanometer, the device Alexander von Humboldt (among others) used to determine just how blue any sky actually is

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Joyce Chaplin @joycechaplin.bsky.social · 01/11/2021

In 2020, I designed a class, “Rewilding Harvard,” to teach students about landscape history and biodiversity, to teach them to work as a team on a project, and to create public-facing material to teach museum visitors about #rewilding and #biodiversity 2/2 (but more to come!)

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