But while Maury left an indelible mark on the fields of oceanography and geography at large, his legacy is not without controversy. Additionally, Tidewater Community College, based in Norfolk, Virginia, owns the R/V Matthew F. Texas A&M University, 345 pp. Among his most striking charts are his depictions of oceanic wind patterns. An Introduction to the Worlds Oceans, 9th ed. Over the course of his career, Maury would produce maps, charts, and inventive diagrams that conveyed his new insights on ocean sciences. Thus, he always had able assistants. Maury Hall to clarify the intent to memorialize his pre-war scientific work (Donegan, 2020). When he was 12 years old, young Matthew climbed high up in a tree but then fell 45 feet to the ground. 1988. He went home after he recovered and told his wife Ann Hull Herndon-Maury, "I have come home to die. Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist. Love learning more about him. In 1868 he was pardoned by the federal government and returned to the US, accepting a teaching position at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, holding the chair of physics. Im named after him. "[citation needed]. Matthew Fontaine Maury & Distraction Tactics Better role models are available for naming buildings and ships, including a number of African American ocean scientists (Zelnio, 2010; Baard, 2015; Baker, 2020; Hidayat and Bhatt, 2020). By the 1850s, he was pursuing a concerted program of publication and lobbying to encourage US exploration in South America with the design of expanding the American system of racial slavery to that region and with the hope of resolving political tensions building between the North and South over the issue of slaverys expansion within the United States (Verney, 2020). Matthew Fontaine Maury | Encyclopedia.com The Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology by Matthew Fontaine Maury. Publ. Even some among Maurys own large but tightly knit Southern family recognized slavery as a moral wrong. On February 17, 2023, the Academy announced that it had renamed this building in honor of Jimmy Carter, the only Naval Academy graduate to become President of the United States. https://www.wdbj7.com/content/news/JMU-students-challenge-university-to-rename-buildings-named-after-Confederate-leaders-571139691.html? Achbari, A. Oreskes, N. 2020. Matthew Fontaine Maury, Fletcher Type Marker Subjects Removed Monuments Historic Science and Technology Figures Civil War, 1861-1865 City Fletcher County Henderson Description A series of markers comprised the "Open-Air Westminster Abbey of the South." Each monument consisted of a large granite mountain boulder and a bronze plaque. A Guide to the Matthew Fontaine Maury Letters, 1848-1861 Maury served as a pallbearer for Lee. Maury established relations for the Confederacy with Emperor Napoleon III of France and Archduke Maximilian of Austria, who, on April 10, 1864, was proclaimed Emperor of Mexico. Today, climate change provides an urgent framework for science, and historical perspective can helpful to clarify the extent to which the challenges scientists tackle are not simply technical but social and political as well. Penelope K Hardy is a PhD candidate in History of Science and Technology at The Johns Hopkins University. After Maurys death in 1873, his children initiated his rehabilitation, beginning with a hagiographic biography by his daughter Diana Fontaine Maury Corbin (1888). [13], Upon his resignation from the U.S. Navy, the Virginia governor appointed Maury commander of the Virginia Navy. Of this group, Maury was the only one who was not a general or president and the only one whose monument celebrated his pre-Confederacy scientific contributions rather than his wartime service (Springston, 2019). He wanted to emulate the naval career of his older brother, Flag Lieutenant John Minor Maury, an officer in the U.S. Navy, who caught yellow fever after fighting pirates. Watch Now: Statue of Jefferson Davis torn down on Monument Avenue. He was a Union man, and not a friend to slavery. Maury, familiar to many in the ocean science and maritime communities as the father of oceanography and pathfinder of the seas, is clearly less well known outside of specialist circles. McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 353 pp. Some were offered to Maury's wife, Ann Hull Herndon-Maury, who accepted them for her husband. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution blog, February 4, https://web.whoi.edu/big/black-history-month-blog-series-2020-highlighting-achievements-of-black-oceanographers/. Domby, A.H. 2020. [11] Maury, along with other politicians, newspaper editors, merchants, and United States government officials, envisioned a future for slavery that linked the United States, the Caribbean Sea, and the Amazon basin in Brazil. Besides his detailed geographic depiction of the landscape, Maury included a wealth of thematic information, including predominant church denominations, geological regions, zoological distributions, and, of course, prevailing wind patterns across the country. F. Driver and L. Martins, eds, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gratuitous links to sites are viewed as spam and Reckoning with a Racist Legacy in Ocean Science privilege to post content on the Library site. When this was consolidated into the Confederate Navy, Maury was made a Commander in the Confederate States Navy and appointed as chief of the Naval Bureau of Coast, Harbor, and River Defense. A statue of Matthew Fontaine Maury on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, was graffitied in mid-June 2020. Maury wrote to his cousin, "Therefore I see in the slave territory of the Amazon the SAFETY VALVE of the Southern States. p. 31. Maury was offered the position as its first president but turned it down because of his age. He published the Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic, which showed sailors how to use the ocean's currents and winds to their advantage, drastically reducing the length of ocean voyages. Always concerned about the lack of formal education for naval officers, Maury turned to science as a career path after a leg injury ended his hopes of command at sea. Maury was a descendant of the Maury family, a prominent Virginia family of Huguenot ancestry that can be traced back to 15th-century France. Knowledge of seasonal and geographic changes aided captains in their cross-Atlantic journeys. Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist - Penelope K Hardy, 2016 - SAGE Journals Naval Hydrographic Office: A 19th-Century Rivalry in Science and Politics. After that he studied naval meteorology, navigation, and charting the winds and currents. American Practical Navigator: an Epitome of Navigation. "[15], Maury wanted to open up the Amazon to free navigation in his plan. Following the end of the war, Maury remained abroad for several years before taking a professorship at the Virginia Military Institute where he would teach until his death in 1873. He argued that a southerly route running through Texas would avoid winter snows and could open up commerce with the northern states of Mexico. The New Virginia Colony was a colonization plan in central Mexico, to resettle ex- Confederates [1] after the American Civil War. This is my great great great grandfather. Maury and Maximilian planned to entice former Confederates to emigrate to Mexico, building Carlotta and New Virginia Colony for displaced Confederates and immigrants from other lands. The content of all comments is released into the public domain Maury was neither a slave-owner nor a proponent of slavery. The damage his actions did to American merchant shipping was conveniently forgotten. Dick, S.J. Museum president Howard Hoege (2020) explained that the recent decision to remove Maurys name from the lake on museum grounds was prompted by imagining an African American student, exhilarated by the experience of doing science on the water, asking for whom the lake was named. Nevertheless, Minorities in marine biology: The dearth of Black professors. Maury wrote to a dear cousin: "I am . January 1889 Issue. Matthew Fontaine Maury has been hailed as, among other names, the "Scientist of the Seas" for his contributions to understanding ocean navigation in the mid-19th century. (Video: Laura Vozzella/The . Brookfield, VT, Ashgate, 551 pp. Born near Fredericksburg, Va., the seventh child of Richard Maury (died Jan. 30, 1843) and Diana Minor Maury (died May 19, 1843). Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina | Matthew Fontaine Maury Typical modern ocean and marine science textbooks include an entire chapter on the history of the field, in striking contrast to textbooks of biology, chemistry, genetics, and other fields which do not (see, for example, Stewart, 2008; Sverdrup etal., 2008; Garrison and Ellis, 2015). As a result of the Brussels Conference, many nations, including many traditional enemies, agreed to cooperate in sharing land and sea weather data using uniform standards. Matthew Fontaine Maury: The Father of Oceanography BY JONATHAN K. CORRADO, PH.D., P. E. * | THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2022 See above the first printed map of oceanic bathymetry, published by Matthew Fontaine Maury in Explanations with data from USS Dolphin (1836).1 Disunion! [1] Maury Hall at the University of Virginia is named for him. Following his brother into the United States Navy, he joined the good ship "Brandywine" as a midshipman, wanting to learn quickly all about the sea. Maury strongly considered attending West Point to get a better education than the Navy could offer. Like many families in that era, the Maury family then moved west, settling south of Nashville, Tennessee. A textbook that explains that Maury was vitally interested in the promotion of a maritime commerce (Garrison and Ellis, 2015) might do well to elaborate that he was vitally interested in the promotion of a maritime commerce dedicated to extending the institution of racial slavery from the US South to other parts of the world as an integral part of the expansion of American imperial power. Understanding that science in the past was connected to, emerged from, and contributed to politics, culture, and ideology puts scientists today in a better position to appreciate how their questions, and their funding, are shaped by present circumstances. . [20] He also gave talks in Europe about cooperation on a weather bureau for land, just as he had charted the winds and predicted storms at sea many years before. Maury entered the navy in 1825 as a midshipman, circumnavigated the globe (1826-30), and in 1836 was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Maurys efforts to expand the slave nation outlasted his service in the US Navy. By July 2, Maury, too, was gone (Manzanares, 2020). Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science: Alexander Dallas Bache and the US Coast Survey. Brandywine, he devoted himself full-time to the study of navigation, meteorology, the winds, and currents. 3 While visiting there, Maury was convinced by his old teacher to give the "cornerstone speech. Matthew Fontaine Maury was born near Fredericksburg, Virginia, 14 January 1806 to Richard Maury (1766-1843) and Diana Minor Maury (1768-1843). Slavery and American sea power: The navalist impulse in the antebellum South. Pp. Matthew Fontaine Maury (January 14, 1806 - February 1, 1873), United States Navy, was an American astronomer, historian, oceanographer, meteorologist, cartographer, author, geologist, and educator. reducing or eliminating the curse of slavery. That distinction is offered in defense of retaining the name Maury Hall for the building at USNA, or for renaming it Lt. Hardy, P.K. Featured Content Matthew Fontaine Maury, lecture on "Science and the Bible," . This goal of extending the slave system thus was neither a brief blip in a career otherwise dedicated to science, nor separate from that science itself. Oceanographers incorporated this history into the teaching of the science itself, so that many students learned, and continue to learn, the stories of how various ocean processes came to be understood alongside the science and mathematics of the processes themselves. Saved Stories Save . Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Problem of Virginia's Identity - JSTOR 1928. He was nicknamed "Pathfinder of the Seas" and is considered a founder of modern oceanography. While Maurys siding with the Confederacy has been a source of controversy in evaluating his legacy today, the scientific value of his contributions to marine navigation, oceanography, and geography is clear. Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-1873) 1806, Jan. 14. Building networks for science: Conflict and cooperation in nineteenth-century global marine studies. Matthew Fontaine Maury - Great Lives Maury estimated he had covered 1,844 miles in 12 November days and made $540; tickets to his lectures sold for 50 cents and he candidly admitted, "Am afraid of empty benches." Matthew Fontaine Maury has been hailed as, among other names, the Scientist of the Seas for his contributions to understanding ocean navigation in the mid-19th century. Instead, he obtained a naval appointment through the influence of Tennessee Representative Sam Houston, a family friend, in 1825, at the age of 19.
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