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Post-1870 Italy, sex and forgiveness in Michel Foucault, the new Messianism of Giordano Bruno, mathematically accurate Astronomy from 350 BCE to 1987 CE, and a history of the future from Earth to Proxima Centauri b: these are the topics examined in Delvings, a scholar’s lifelong study of the history of ideas and humanity’s search for truth.

I have been interested in France and Italy as well as in the Ancient Greek and Middle Eastern worlds since I was old enough to pour over my grandparents’ old encyclopedia and my own Landmark illustrated history books. Like many kids in the ‘50s, I used to watch Flash Gordon on TV and dream about humans exploring other places in the universe. And I even loved algebra, geometry, and trigonometry in high school.

These various interests, all from my youth in the fifties and sixties, have stuck with me in one way or another, and they developed into my vocation as a historian, where I didn’t need intergalactic tights, a ray gun, or even a slide rule for the exploration of a universe of ideas and the never-ending battle against the enemy of misinformation.

The first of the six chapters of which Delvings is comprised discusses the problem of creating a unified Italian peninsula and people. The next chapter focuses on two important and transformative French historians of the twentieth century, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Michel Foucault. The third chapter is about a sixteenth-century Italian philosopher, Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 because he had proclaimed himself to be the one true Messiah of the infinite number of worlds in the infinite universe.

While these chapters focus on Italy and French and Italian thinkers, the chapter which follows them describes how accurate, mathematical astronomy has existed since the time of the late Mesopotamians (ca. 350 BCE) to the time of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity (1905 CE). The last chapter before the Post Scriptum will discuss, almost in the fashion of Jules Verne, the necessity of humans to relocate in about one hundred years from now to a far-off exoplanet because of the Climate Change disasters on our Earth.

Edward Alberic Gosselin is Emeritus Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach, where he taught for thirty-four years. He served as History Department Chair and as Editor of the Society for History Education’s journal, The History Teacher. He has also been a visiting Emeritus Professor at Southern Oregon University.

Dr. Gosselin is a graduate of Yale University (BA) and Columbia University (MA and PhD). His specialities are Renaissance and Reformation history, the history of science, modernization theory, twentieth-century French historiography, and the decolonization of the British Empire. He is a former Fulbright Research Scholar in France.

Dr. Gosselin has been an academic-year Fellow at the National Humanities Institute at the University of Chicago, and has held summer fellowships at Stanford University, Yale University, and at the University of Texas, Austin.

He lives in Jacksonville, Oregon, with his wife, Jois Harkness, and their two dogs.