Rhoda Rappaport
Professor Emeritus of History (1961-2000)
Thanks to one of the few undergraduate history courses she took at Goucher College, Rhoda Rappaport was seduced by the history of science. She then received training in history at Cornell University (Ph.D., 1964).
What some Vassar history majors learned as undergraduates, she had to confront in graduate school: the need to examine historical contexts so as not to assume that what we accept today are objective truths [see, for example, 1984 and 1988 entries on the History Department web site link "What Can I Do With a History Major?"]. Some of her publications are explicitly fruits of that mental revolution; these include "Geology and Orthodoxy: The Case of Noah's Flood in Eighteenth-Century Thought" and "Borrowed Words: Problems of Vocabulary in Eighteenth-Century Geology," both in The British Journal for the History of Science, 11 (1978), 1-18, and 15 (1982), 27-44, as well as When Geologists Were Historians, 1665-1750 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), and an article now in press, "Dangerous Words: Diluvialism, Neptunism, and Catastrophism."