An Unexpected Foray Into Awe - Nye's American Technological Sublime

My degree program puts me in classrooms at many of U.C. Berkeley's colleges. This semester I happen to be enrolled in a Transportation Policy and Planning course that led me into a book that led me directly back to my prior musings on awe.

Karen Frick, author of a new book on the subject, spoke on the history of the construction of the new Bay Bridge, and particularly on the arguments over the new bridge's aesthetics and meaning as a key part of the formal decisionmaking process. During the course of the lecture, she mentioned David Nye's American Technological Sublime (1994), which just sounded cool to me. So I picked it up and read it.

I'm Australian (and Other Things I Didn't Know)

I thought my family history had been lost to time. My great-grandfather on my father's side was from South Africa, and the name Orford is particular enough that it was pretty clear we started in England, but that is all that anybody remembered.

I was reminded of this recently and created an account on one of the online genealogy sites to see what I could see. It turns out that the answer was quite a lot. I have verified that all of the below is true, from scans of the original documents starting in 1740. This is probably of interest to about five people in the world, but I found the process of discovering it to be thoroughly absorbing, and am very glad to leave this record here.