Susan Faye Cannon, born Walter Faw Cannon (1925, Durham, North Carolina

Durham, North Carolina

Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Durham County and also extends into Wake County. It is the fifth-largest city in the state, and the 85th-largest in the United States by population, with 228,330 residents as of the 2010 United States census...

 – 1981) was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 historian of science.

The son of James Cannon III (1892-1960), Dean of Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

 Divinity School, Walter F. Cannon gained a degree in physics at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

.. Turning to history of science

History of science

The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....

, his PhD (Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, 1956) was titled 'On uniformity and progression in early Victorian cosmography'. In the early 1960s he wrote influential articles on uniformitarian

Uniformitarianism (science)

In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the...

 geology, the 'Cambridge network', William Whewell

William Whewell

William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.-Life and career:Whewell was born in Lancaster...

's tidology, John Herschel

John Herschel

Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS ,was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work...

, the relation of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

 to William Paley

William Paley

William Paley was a British Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology, which made use of the watchmaker analogy .-Life:Paley was Born in Peterborough, England, and was...

, liberal Anglicanism

Anglicanism

Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English...

, and the general place of science in nineteenth-century culture. From 1962 to 1979 Cannon, as a historian of science, was Curator of the Classical Physics and Geosciences collection at the Smithsonian Institution

Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...

. He founded and was the first editor of the Smithsonian Journal of History. In 1976 Cannon changed his name to Susan Faye Cannon, thereafter referring to himself as a 'male woman'.

Works

• "The Problem of Miracles in the 1830s", Victorian Studies 4 (1960), 5-32.
• "The Impact of Uniformitarianism: Two Letters from John Herschel to Charles Lyell, 1836-37," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105 (1961) 310-14.
• "The Uniformitarian-Catastrophist Debate," Isis 51 (1960) 38-55.
• "John Herschel and the Idea of Science," Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (1961), 215-39
• "Scientists and Broad Churchmen: An Early Victorian Intellectual Network", Journal of British Studies 4 (1964): 65–88.
• Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, 1978.