Author: Helen Cowie
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526117673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
This book examines the study of natural history in the Spanish empire in the years 1750-1850. During this period, Spain made strenuous efforts to survey, inventory and exploit the natural productions of her overseas possessions, orchestrating a serries of scientific expeditions and cultivating and displaying American fauna and flora in metropolitan gardens and museums. This book assesses the cultural significance of natural history, emphasising the figurative and utilitarian value with which eighteenth-century Spaniards invested natural objects, from globetrotting elephants to three-legged chickens. It considers how the creation, legitimisation and dissemination of scientific knowledge reflected broader questions of imperial power and national identity. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Spanish and Latin American History, the History of Science and Imperial Culture
Author: Helen Cowie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526117663
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This book examines the study of natural history in the Spanish Empire in the years, 1750-1850, taking a transatlantic approach to the history of science.
Author: Matthew James Crawford
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981394
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
In the eighteenth century, malaria was a prevalent and deadly disease, and the only effective treatment was found in the Andean forests of Spanish America: a medicinal bark harvested from cinchona trees that would later give rise to the antimalarial drug quinine. In 1751, the Spanish Crown asserted control over the production and distribution of this medicament by establishing a royal reserve of "fever trees" in Quito. Through this pilot project, the Crown pursued a new vision of imperialism informed by science and invigorated through commerce. But ultimately this project failed, much like the broader imperial reforms that it represented. Drawing on extensive archival research, Matthew Crawford explains why, showing how indigenous healers, laborers, merchants, colonial officials, and creole elites contested European science and thwarted imperial reform by asserting their authority to speak for the natural world. The Andean Wonder Drug uses the story of cinchona bark to demonstrate how the imperial politics of knowledge in the Spanish Atlantic ultimately undermined efforts to transform European science into a tool of empire.
Author: Mackenzie Cooley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000873021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 557
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Book Description
The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore the relationships among natural things - ranging from pollen in a gust of wind to a carnivorous pitcher plant to a shell-like skinned armadillo - and the humans enthralled with them. Episodes from 1500 to the early 1900s reveal connected histories across early modern worlds as natural things traveled across the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire, Pacific islands, Southeast Asia, the Spanish Empire, and Western Europe. In distant worlds that were constantly changing with expanding networks of trade, colonial aspirations, and the rise of empiricism, natural things obtained new meanings and became alienated from their origins. Tracing the processes of their displacement, each chapter starts with a piece of original artwork that relies on digital collage to pull image sources out of place and to represent meanings that natural things lost and remade. Accessible and elegant, Natural Things is the first study of its kind to combine original visualizations with the history of science. Museum-goers, scholars, scientists, and students will find new histories of nature and collecting within. Its playful visuality will capture the imagination of non-academic and academic readers alike while reminding us of the alienating capacity of the modern life sciences.
Author: Sarah Longair
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526118289
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Curating empire explores the diverse roles played by museums and their curators in moulding and representing the British imperial experience. This collection demonstrates how individuals, their curatorial practices, and intellectual and political agendas influenced the development of a variety of museums across the globe. Taken together, these contributions suggest that museums are not just sites for accessing history but need to be considered as historical sites of significance in themselves. Individual essays examine the work of curators in museums in Britain and the colonies, the historical display and interpretation of empire in Britain, and the establishment of ‘museum networks’ in the British imperial context. Curating empire sheds new light on the relationship between museums, as repositories for objects and cultural institutions for conveying knowledge, and the politics of culture and the formation of identities throughout the British Empire.
Author: Lesley Wylie
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1835535224
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.
Author: Luis J. Gordo Peláez
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003822649
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
This edited collection examines the development of Atlantic World architecture after 1492. In particular, the chapters explore the landscapes of extraction as material networks that brought people, space, and labor together in harvesting raw materials, cultivating agriculture for export-level profits, and circulating raw materials and commodities in Europe, Africa, and the Americas from 1500 to 1850. This book argues that histories of extraction remain incomplete without careful attention to the social, physical, and mental nexus that is architecture, just as architecture’s development in the last 500 years cannot be adequately comprehended without attention to empire, extraction, colonialism, and the rise of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the world system. This world system was possible because of built environments that enabled resource extraction, transport of raw materials, circulation of commodities, and enactment of power relations in the struggle between capital and labor. Separated into three sections: Harvesting the Environment, Cultivating Profit, and Circulating Commodities: Networks and Infrastructures, this volume covers a wide range of geographies, from England to South America, from Africa to South Carolina. The book aims to decenter Eurocentric approaches to architectural history to expose the global circulation of ideas, things, commodities, and people that constituted the architecture of extraction in the Atlantic World. In focusing on extraction, we aim to recover histories of labor exploitation and racialized oppression of interest to the global community. The book will be of interest to researchers and students of architectural history, geography, urban and labor history, literary studies, historic preservation, and colonial studies.
Author: Jeff Greenfield
Publisher: Fox Chapel Publishing+ORM
ISBN: 1637412584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 163
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Book Description
The course of history has taken many turns. What would the world be like if events had happened differently? What if JFK had never visited Dallas on November 22, 1963? What if Germany had won the First World War? How would life be different in America if the Southern states had beaten the North? What would a world without The Beatles sound like? Find out the potential answers to all these questions and many more in What If...:Book of Alternative History.With great full-color photos and compelling narratives, historical experts take a look at these and many more intriguing questions in this fascinating look at what might have been. Perfect for browsing, this title will have readers speculating on the events and people that shaped history and make our lives what they are today.
Author: Sophie Brockmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108421237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Demonstrates the role of local and global scientific knowledge about landscapes and environment in shaping Central America.
Author: Diego Armus
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988437
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
Health practitioners working in gray zones, or between official and unofficial medicines, played a fundamental role in shaping Latin America from the colonial period onward. The Gray Zones of Medicine offers a human, relatable, complex examination of the history of health and healing in Latin America across five centuries. Contributors uncover how biographical narratives of individual actors—outside those of hegemonic biomedical knowledge, careers of successful doctors, public health initiatives, and research and medical institutions—can provide a unique window into larger social, cultural, political, and economic historical changes and continuities in the region. They reveal the power of such stories to illuminate intricacies and resilient features of the history of health and disease, and they demonstrate the importance of escaping analytical constraints posed by binary frameworks of legality/illegality, learned/popular, and orthodoxy/heterodoxy when writing about the past. Through an accessible and story-like format, this book unlocks the potential of historical narratives of healings to understand and give nuance to processes too frequently articulated through intellectual medical histories or the lenses of empires, nation-states, and their institutions.
