On November 12, 1833, residents of North America witnessed over 100,000 visible meteors falling over the course of four hours.  They woke their families and neighbours, creating a shared, continent-wide experience of epistemological crisis—for though the science of astronomy had made tremendous strides over previous centuries, it had not gotten around to figuring out meteors.  Did the extraordinary display in the sky have something to do with gases and electricity?  Or was it a sign from God that the end of the world was nigh?  How was it interpreted by enslaved people and enslavers? Native Americans on the central plains?  Mormons in Missouri? This project aims for a multi-epistemological history of the continent, told over four hours, though caught up in a moment of wrenching transformations in American life.

Speaker: Phil Deloria - Respondents: Ruth Morgan and Jilda Andrews, Chair: Ben Silverstein

Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent) is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998), Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), American Studies: A User’s Guide (University of California Press, 2017), with Alexander Olson, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), as well as two co-edited books and numerous articles and chapters.

Deloria received his PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught at the University of Colorado, and then, from 2001 to 2017, at the University of Michigan, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. Deloria was a long-serving trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. He is the former president of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for American History, an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions.

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_{Image: The most famous depiction of the 1833 Leonids, actually produced in 1888 for the Adventist book Bible Readings for the Home Circle. The engraving is by Adolf Vollmy based on an original painting by the Swiss artist Karl Jauslin, that is in turn based on a first-person account of the 1833 storm by a minister, Joseph Harvey Waggoner on his way from Florida to New Orleans - April 1844 (artwork); 1833 (event depicted) (Wikimedia)}