Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series Editor: Bernard Lightman, York University Editorial Board: Robert Brain (University of British Columbia) Pietro Corsi (University of Oxford) Shinjini Das (University of East Anglia) Fa-ti Fan (SUNY Binghamton) Bruce J. Hunt (University of Texas) Myles Jackson (Princeton Institute for Advanced Study) Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (University of Minnesota) Carlos López Beltrán (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas/UNAM) Lynn K. Nyhart (University of Wisconsin–Madison) Michael A. Osborne (Oregon State University) Gregory Radick (University of Leeds) Marc Rothenberg (Smithsonian Institution Archives) Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge) Jutta Schickore (Indiana University) Efram Sera-Shriar (Durham University & University of Copenhagen) Ann Shteir (York University) Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford) Robert Smith (University of Alberta) Jonathan R. Topham (University of Leeds)Series Editor: Bernard Lightman, York University Editorial Board: Robert Brain (University of British Columbia) Pietro Corsi (University of Oxford) Shinjini Das (University of East Anglia) Fa-ti Fan (SUNY Binghamton) Bruce J. Hunt (University of Texas) Myles Jackson (Princeton Institute for Advanced Study) Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (University of Minnesota) Carlos López Beltrán (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas/UNAM) Lynn K. Nyhart (University of Wisconsin–Madison) Michael A. Osborne (Oregon State University) Gregory Radick (University of Leeds) Marc Rothenberg (Smithsonian Institution Archives) Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge) Jutta Schickore (Indiana University) Efram Sera-Shriar (Durham University & University of Copenhagen) Ann Shteir (York University) Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford) Robert Smith (University of Alberta) Jonathan R. Topham (University of Leeds)
An era of exciting and transformative scientific discoveries, the nineteenth century was also a period when significant features of the relationship between contemporary science and culture first assumed form. This book series includes studies of major developments within the disciplines—including geology, biology, botany, astronomy, physics, chemistry, medicine, technology, and mathematics—as well as themes within the social sciences, natural philosophy, natural history, the alternative sciences, and popular science. In addition, books in the series may examine science in relation to one or more of its many contexts, including literature, politics, religion, class, gender, colonialism and imperialism, material culture, and visual and print culture.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822966487
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
Victorian anthropology has been derided as an "armchair practice," distinct from the scientific discipline of the twentieth century. But the observational practices that characterized the study of human diversity developed from the established sciences of natural history, geography and medicine. Sera-Shriar argues that anthropology at this time went through a process of innovation which built on scientifically grounded observational study.
Far from being an evolutionary dead end, nineteenth-century anthropology laid the foundations for the field-based science of anthropology today.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822966401
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
Physicist John Tyndall and his contemporaries were at the forefront of developing the cosmology of scientific naturalism during the Victorian period. They rejected all but physical laws as having any impact on the operations of human life and the universe. Contributors focus on the way Tyndall and his correspondents developed their ideas through letters, periodicals and scientific journals and challenge previously held assumptions about who gained authority, and how they attained and defended their position within the scientific community.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780822966463
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
The nineteenth century saw science move from being the preserve of a small learned elite to a dominant force which influenced society as a whole. Sakurai presents a study of how scientific societies affected the social and political life of a city. As it did not have a university or a centralized government, Frankfurt am Main is an ideal case study of how scientific associations - funded by private patronage for the good of the local populace - became an important centre for natural history.
Regionalizing Science
Placing Knowledges in Victorian England
Format: Paperback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822966425
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
Victorian England, as is well known, produced an enormous amount of scientific endeavour, but what has previously been overlooked is the important role of geography on these developments. Naylor seeks to rectify this imbalance by presenting a historical geography of regional science. Taking an in-depth look at the county of Cornwall, questions on how science affected provincial Victorian society, how it changed people’s relationship with the landscape and how it shaped society are applied to the Cornish case study, allowing a depth and texture of analysis denied to more general scientific overviews of the period.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822966326
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
The nineteenth century was an important period for both the proliferation of "popular" science and for the demarcation of a group of professionals that we now term scientists. Of course for Ireland, largely in contrast to the rest of Britain, the prominence of Catholicism posed various philosophical questions regarding research. Adelman’s study examines the practical educational impact of the growth of science in these communities, and the impact of this on the country’s economy; the role of museums and exhibitions in spreading scientific knowledge; and the role that science had to play in Ireland’s turbulent political context.
Adelman challenges historians to reassess the relationship between science and society, showing that the unique situation in Victorian Ireland can nonetheless have important implications for wider European interpretations of the development of this relationship during a period of significant change.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822966432
Pub Date: 06 Jun 2021
Description:
This collection of essays explores the rise of scientific medicine and its impact on Victorian popular culture. Chapters include an examination of Charles Dickens’s involvement with hospital funding, concerns over milk purity and the theatrical portrayal of drug addiction, plus a whole section devoted to the representation of medicine in crime fiction. This is an interdisciplinary study involving public health, cultural studies, the history of medicine, literature and the theatre, providing new insights into Victorian culture and society.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780822966340
Pub Date: 02 Apr 2021
Description:
Elwick explores how the concept of "compound individuality" brought together life scientists working in pre-Darwinian London. Scientists conducting research in comparative anatomy, physiology, cellular microscopy, embryology and the neurosciences repeatedly stated that plants and animals were compounds of smaller independent units. Discussion of a "bodily economy" was widespread.
But by 1860, the most flamboyant discussions of compound individuality had come to an end in Britain. Elwick relates the growth and decline of questions about compound individuality to wider nineteenth-century debates about research standards and causality. He uses specific technical case studies to address overarching themes of reason and scientific method.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822966333
Pub Date: 09 Mar 2021
Description:
The concept of eccentricity was central to how people in the nineteenth century understood their world. This monograph is the first scholarly history of eccentricity. Carroll explores how discourses of eccentricity were established to make sense of individuals who did not seem to fit within an increasingly organized social and economic order.
She focuses on the self-taught natural philosopher William Martin, the fossilist Thomas Hawkins and the taxidermist Charles Waterton.
Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840-1910
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822966395
Pub Date: 02 Mar 2021
Description:
Victorian culture was characterized by a proliferation of shows and exhibitions. These were encouraged by the development of new sciences and technologies, together with changes in transportation, education and leisure patterns. The essays in this collection look at exhibitions and their influence in terms of location, technology and ideology.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822966371
Pub Date: 01 Dec 2020
Description:
Higgitt examines Isaac Newton's changing legacy during the nineteenth century. She focuses on 1820–1870, a period that saw the creation of the specialized and secularized role of the "scientist." At the same time, researchers gained better access to Newton's archives.
These were used both by those who wished to undermine the traditional, idealised depiction of scientific genius and those who felt obliged to defend Newtonian hagiography. Higgitt shows how debates about Newton's character stimulated historical scholarship and led to the development of a new expertise in the history of science.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822945956
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Illustrations: 9 b&w
Description:
Sir Oliver Lodge was a polymathic scientific figure who linked the Victorian Age with the Second World War, a reassuring figure of continuity across his long life and career. A physicist and spiritualist, inventor and educator, author and authority, he was one of the most famous public figures of British science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A pioneer in the invention of wireless communication and later of radio broadcasting, he was foundational for twentieth-century media technology and a tireless communicator who wrote upon and debated many of the pressing interests of the day in the sciences and far beyond.
Yet since his death, Lodge has been marginalized. By uncovering the many aspects of his life and career, and the changing dynamics of scientific authority in an era of specialization, contributors to this volume reveal how figures like Lodge fell out of view as technical experts came to dominate the public understanding of science in the second half of the twentieth century. They account for why he was so greatly cherished by many of his contemporaries, examine the reasons for his eclipse, and consider what Lodge, a century on, might teach us about taking a more integrated approach to key scientific controversies of the day.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 206
ISBN: 9780822945765
Pub Date: 26 Nov 2019
Illustrations: 10
Description:
When the Reverend Henry Carmichael opened the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts in 1833, he introduced a bold directive: for Australia to advance on the scale of nations, it needed to develop a science of its own. Prominent scientists in the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria answered this call by participating in popular exhibitions far and near, from London’s Crystal Place in 1851 to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane during the final decades of the nineteenth century. A Science of Our Own explores the influential work of local botanists, chemists, and geologists—William B.
Clarke, Joseph Bosisto, Robert Brough Smyth, and Ferdinand Mueller—who contributed to shaping a distinctive public science in Australia during the nineteenth century. It extends beyond the political underpinnings of the development of public science to consider the rich social and cultural context at its core. For the Australian colonies, as Peter H. Hoffenberg argues, these exhibitions not only offered a path to progress by promoting both the knowledge and authority of local scientists and public policies; they also ultimately redefined the relationship between science and society by representing and appealing to the growing popularity of science at home and abroad.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 242
ISBN: 9780822945758
Pub Date: 12 Nov 2019
Illustrations: 19
Description:
Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century was both the second city of the British Empire and the soon-to-be capital of an emerging nation, presenting a unique space in which to examine the past relationship between science and the city. Drawing on both geography and biography, Geographies of City Science underscores the crucial role urban spaces played in the production of scientific knowledge. Each chapter explores the lives of two practitioners from one of the main religious and political traditions in Dublin (either Protestant and Unionist or Catholic and Nationalist).
As Tanya O’Sullivan argues, any variation in their engagement with science had far less to do with their affiliations than with their “life spaces”—domains where human agency and social structures collide. Focusing on nineteenth-century debates on the origins of the universe as well as the origins of form, humans, and language, O’Sullivan explores the numerous ways in which scientific meaning relating to origin theories was established and mobilized in the city. By foregrounding Dublin, her book complements more recent attempts to enrich the historiography of metropolitan science by examining its provenance in less well-known urban centers.
Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition
Retracing the Origins of Conflict
Pages: 309
ISBN: 9780822945819
Pub Date: 29 Oct 2019
Illustrations: 30
Pages: 309
ISBN: 9780822967415
Pub Date: 31 Oct 2024
Description:
The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis.
Unravelling its origins, James Ungureanu argues that Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for a much larger and more important argument dating back to the Protestant Reformation, where one theological tradition was pitted against another—a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity. By the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of conflict between “science and religion” were largely deployed between contending theological schools of thought. However, these narratives were later appropriated by secularists, freethinkers, and atheists as weapons against all religion. By revisiting its origins, development, and popularization, Ungureanu ultimately reveals that the “conflict thesis” was just one of the many unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822945529
Pub Date: 17 Sep 2019
Illustrations: 21 b&w illustrations
Description:
Mass media in the late nineteenth century was full of news from Mars. In the wake of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 discovery of enigmatic dark, straight lines on the red planet, astronomers and the public at large vigorously debated the possibility that it might be inhabited. As rivalling scientific practitioners looked to marshal allies and sway public opinion—through newspapers, periodicals, popular books, exhibitions, and encyclopaedias—they exposed disagreements over how the discipline of astronomy should be organized and how it should establish acceptable conventions of discourse.
News from Mars provides a new account of this extraordinary episode in the history of astronomy, revealing how major transformations in astronomical practice across Britain and America were inextricably tied up with popular scientific culture and a transatlantic news economy that enabled knowledge to travel. As Joshua Nall argues, astronomers were journalists, too, eliding practice with communication in consequential ways. As writers and editors, they played a pivotal role in the emergence of a “new astronomy” dedicated to the study of the physical constitution and life history of celestial objects, blurring harsh distinctions between those who produced esoteric knowledge and those who disseminated it.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780822966081
Pub Date: 25 Jun 2019
Description:
Adolphe Quetelet was an influential astronomer and statistician whose controversial work inspired heated debate in European and American intellectual circles. In creating a science designed to explain the “average man,” he helped contribute to the idea of normal, most enduringly in his creation of the Quetelet Index, which came to be known as the Body Mass Index. Kevin Donnelly presents the first scholarly biography of Quetelet, exploring his contribution to quantitative reasoning, his place in nineteenth-century intellectual history, and his profound influence on the modern idea of average.
