Thomas Hariot, the Mathematician, the Philosopher and the Scholar

Thomas Hariot studied the heavens and the laws of light—and also recorded the unfamiliar world of Virginia. How did one scholar’s work come to touch both the frontiers of science and the beginnings of English America?

In the age of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ventures across the Atlantic, Hariot moved between the learned circles of England and the new English colony in Virginia. Henry Stevens follows a man whose mathematical and astronomical investigations sit alongside his accounts of the New World, tracing the connections that made him more than a scholar at the edge of someone else’s story. Drawing on historical records, Stevens asks readers to look again at a figure whose contributions have been easy to overlook—and whose papers may change how we understand the early history of America. What else has Hariot’s record preserved?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.