The Standing of the Stones Spring ’22 Edition

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Yeah, it has been a long time since I wrote something substantial, hasn’t it? Even Women’s History Month passed without a peep. Both work and my poor teeth exploded, so it’s been a few months of ending up too drained to word properly while I take care of those matters. Thank you so much for sticking with me regardless. It’s about to get good and earth sciency around here.

I haven’t been completely idle: I’ve been researching Marguerite Thomas Williams, the first African American to earn a PhD in geology. Dozens of articles are out there about her. Precisely none contain any of her words. They list off the same few facts, mostly, which tell us some important and interesting things about her, but don’t give her a living memory. She feels remote, removed, like we’re viewing a damaged newsreel from the back of a theater with a moth-eaten screen and a failing projector. Some of the facts given are there to try to illustrate how unique she was, but they’re wrong: she wasn’t born in the Reconstruction era, in fact was nearly twenty years too late. Even the photo many use to portray her isn’t actually her.

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