Barr's Buffon. Buffon's Natural History,

Barr's Buffon. Buffon's Natural History, PDF Author: Georges Louis Leclerc comte de Buffon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Natural history
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Barr's Buffon. Buffon's Natural History ... From the French. With Notes by the Translator, Etc

Barr's Buffon. Buffon's Natural History ... From the French. With Notes by the Translator, Etc PDF Author: George Louis LE CLERC (Count de Buffon.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Natural History of Birds, Fish, Insects, and Reptiles

Natural History of Birds, Fish, Insects, and Reptiles PDF Author: Georges Louis Leclerc comte de Buffon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Zoology
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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A Hideous Monster of the Mind

A Hideous Monster of the Mind PDF Author: Bruce Dain
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674030141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism. From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously "black" African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist "natural history" into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences. In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion "race" caused for thinkers black and white, A Hideous Monster of the Mind offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.

Every Living Thing

Every Living Thing PDF Author: Jason Roberts
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 0307374580
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of A Sense of the World comes this dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life on Earth. In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible—how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity's role in shaping the fate of our planet and on humanity itself. The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called "apostles" (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens—but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn. With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, featuring appearances by Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin, bestselling author Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.

Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose

Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose PDF Author: Lee Alan Dugatkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663910X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Capturing the essence of the origin and evolution of the so-called "degeneracy debates," over whether the flora and fauna of America (including Native Americans) were naturally weaker and feebler than species elsewhere in the world, this book chronicles Thomas Jefferson's efforts to counter French conceptions of American degeneracy, culminating in his sending of a stuffed moose to Buffon

The Art of Discovery

The Art of Discovery PDF Author: Margareth Hagen
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
ISBN: 8779347371
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This anthology brings together scholars from literature, the natural sciences, and the philosophy of science, to present new perspectives on the relations between literary and scientific communities. Drawing on literature spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as Europe and the Americas, the authors explore how science has been portrayed from the perspective of literature at different times and in different places - as challenge or opportunity, promise or scandal. The disturbance of science emanates perhaps from its association with a frightening future or its ability to change the appearance of the past; the scandal occurs as it recalls us to thresholds and hybrids: human and non-human, animal and machine. Science, however, also emerges as a source of metaphor and imaginative modelling, of encodings and decodings, representations and discoveries. Less prominent in the collection, though no less important, is the view on how scientific cultures portray literature or the literary academic, and how science reflects on itself.

Juvenile Botany

Juvenile Botany PDF Author: Robert John Thornton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Botany
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Kant's Organicism

Kant's Organicism PDF Author: Jennifer Mensch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627151X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Offers you an accessible portrait of Kant's scientific milieu in order to show that his standing interests in natural history and its questions regarding organic generation were critical for the development of his theoretical philosophy. The author provides a new understanding of much that has been otherwise obscure or misunderstood in it

Disowning Slavery

Disowning Slavery PDF Author: Joanne Pope Melish
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources—from slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist broadsides—Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how northern society changed but how its perceptions changed as well. Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to accept a population of free people of color in its midst. Because emancipation was gradual, whites transferred prejudices shaped by slavery to their relations with free people of color, and their attitudes were buttressed by abolitionist rhetoric which seemed to promise riddance of slaves as much as slavery. She tells how whites came to blame the impoverished condition of people of color on their innate inferiority, how racialization became an important component of New England ante-bellum nationalism, and how former slaves actively participated in this discourse by emphasizing their African identity. Placing race at the center of New England history, Melish contends that slavery was important not only as a labor system but also as an institutionalized set of relations. The collective amnesia about local slavery's existence became a significant component of New England regional identity.

How Giraffes Work

How Giraffes Work PDF Author: Graham Mitchell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197571190
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive overview of wild and free-living giraffes. Graham Mitchell combines nearly every piece of published research about this species into the pages of this book, making it an incredibly useful book for researchers, scientists, and naturalists studying a single species.