Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science

Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science PDF Author: Hugh Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
It is rare nowadays to come upon an undeservedly neglected figure from Britain's Victorian age, but Hugh Miller (1802-56), the subject of this book, is certainly one such. Admired in his time by such celebrated thinkers as Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle, Hugh Miller's many books on science, literature and religion sold in tens of thousands of copies, winning admirers around the world. This collection of essays offers the first modern assessment of Miller, his life and work, and reveals one of the most fascinating and baffling men of his day.

Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science

Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science PDF Author: Hugh Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Get Book

Book Description
It is rare nowadays to come upon an undeservedly neglected figure from Britain's Victorian age, but Hugh Miller (1802-56), the subject of this book, is certainly one such. Admired in his time by such celebrated thinkers as Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle, Hugh Miller's many books on science, literature and religion sold in tens of thousands of copies, winning admirers around the world. This collection of essays offers the first modern assessment of Miller, his life and work, and reveals one of the most fascinating and baffling men of his day.

Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science

Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science PDF Author: David N. Livingstone
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226487261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
Here, David Livingstone and Charles Withers gather essays that deftly navigate the spaces of science in this significant period and reveal how each is embedded in wider systems of meaning authority, and identity.

Aspects of the Life and Works of Archibald Geikie

Aspects of the Life and Works of Archibald Geikie PDF Author: J. Betterton
Publisher: Geological Society of London
ISBN: 1786204029
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Sir Archibald Geikie (1835–1924) was one of the most distinguished and influential geologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was Director-General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, President of the Geological Society of London, President of the British Association, Trustee of the British Museum and President of the Royal Society. He was also an accomplished writer, a masterful lecturer and a talented artist who published over 200 scientific papers, books and articles. The papers in this volume examine aspects of Geikie’s life and works, including his family history, his personal and professional relationships, his art, and his contributions as a field geologist and administrator. Together, they provide a deeper understanding of his life, his career and his contribution to the development of Geology as a scientific discipline. Much of the research is based on primary sources, including previously unpublished manuscripts, donated in part by members of the family to the Haslemere Educational Museum, UK.

Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective

Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective PDF Author: David N. Livingstone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019535396X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, evangelicals often took their place among prominent practicing scientists, and their perspectives exerted a considerable impact on the development of modern western science. Over the last century, however, evangelical scientists have become less visible, even as the focus of evangelical engagement has shifted to political and cultural spheres. Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective offers the first wide-ranging survey of the history of the encounter between evangelical Protestantism and science. Comprising papers by leading historians of science and religion, this collection shows that the questions of science have been central to the history of evangelicalism in the United States, as well as in Britain and Canada. It will be an invaluable resource for understanding the historical context of contemporary political squabbles, such as the debate over the status of creation science and the teaching of evolution.

Victorian Sensation

Victorian Sensation PDF Author: James A. Secord
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022615825X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 645

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Book Description
Fiction or philosophy, profound knowledge or shocking heresy? When Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously in 1844, it sparked one of the greatest sensations of the Victorian era. More than a hundred thousand readers were spellbound by its startling vision—an account of the world that extended from the formation of the solar system to the spiritual destiny of humanity. As gripping as a popular novel, Vestiges combined all the current scientific theories in fields ranging from astronomy and geology to psychology and economics. The book was banned, it was damned, it was hailed as the gospel for a new age. This is where our own public controversies about evolution began. In a pioneering cultural history, James A. Secord uses the story of Vestiges to create a panoramic portrait of life in the early industrial era from the perspective of its readers. We join apprentices in a factory town as they debate the consequences of an evolutionary ancestry. We listen as Prince Albert reads aloud to Queen Victoria from a book that preachers denounced as blasphemy vomited from the mouth of Satan. And we watch as Charles Darwin turns its pages in the flea-ridden British Museum library, fearful for the fate of his own unpublished theory of evolution. Using secret letters, Secord reveals how Vestiges was written and how the anonymity of its author was maintained for forty years. He also takes us behind the scenes to a bustling world of publishers, printers, and booksellers to show how the furor over the book reflected the emerging industrial economy of print. Beautifully written and based on painstaking research, Victorian Sensation offers a new approach to literary history, the history of reading, and the history of science. Profusely illustrated and full of fascinating stories, it is the most comprehensive account of the making and reception of a book (other than the Bible) ever attempted. Winner of the 2002 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society

Novel Science

Novel Science PDF Author: Adelene Buckland
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226923630
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Novel Science is the first in-depth study of the shocking, groundbreaking, and sometimes beautiful writings of the gentlemen of the “heroic age” of geology and of the contribution these men made to the literary culture of their day. For these men, literature was an essential part of the practice of science itself, as important to their efforts as mapmaking, fieldwork, and observation. The reading and writing of imaginative literatures helped them to discover, imagine, debate, and give shape and meaning to millions of years of previously undiscovered earth history. Borrowing from the historical fictions of Walter Scott and the poetry of Lord Byron, they invented geology as a science, discovered many of the creatures we now call the dinosaurs, and were the first to unravel and map the sequence and structure of stratified rock. As Adelene Buckland shows, they did this by rejecting the grand narratives of older theories of the earth or of biblical cosmogony: theirs would be a humble science, faithfully recording minute details and leaving the big picture for future generations to paint. Buckland also reveals how these scientists—just as they had drawn inspiration from their literary predecessors—gave Victorian realist novelists such as George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens a powerful language with which to create dark and disturbing ruptures in the too-seductive sweep of story.

Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds

Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds PDF Author: Anny Sadrin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349273546
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The essays collected in this volume offer fresh readings of Dickens's travelogues and novels, often pointing to the many-sidedness of his personality. The 'uncommercial traveller' emerges as an ecumenical John Bull, chary of the alien but greedy of novelty, a man whose incursions on well-trodden or unfamiliar ground are always journeys into the uncanny. Besides dealing with the geography of the novelist's imagination, the book explores numerous 'new worlds' such as the inspiring world of Victorian science and Dickens's responses to it or the world of modern literary theory that shapes our own responses to his work.

Victorian Popularizers of Science

Victorian Popularizers of Science PDF Author: Bernard Lightman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226481174
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
The ideas of Charles Darwin and his fellow Victorian scientists have had an abiding effect on the modern world. But at the time The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British public looked not to practicing scientists but to a growing group of professional writers and journalists to interpret the larger meaning of scientific theories in terms they could understand and in ways they could appreciate. Victorian Popularizers of Science focuses on this important group of men and women who wrote about science for a general audience in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bernard Lightman examines more than thirty of the most prolific, influential, and interesting popularizers of the day, investigating the dramatic lecturing techniques, vivid illustrations, and accessible literary styles they used to communicate with their audience. By focusing on a forgotten coterie of science writers, their publishers, and their public, Lightman offers new insights into the role of women in scientific inquiry, the market for scientific knowledge, tensions between religion and science, and the complexities of scientific authority in nineteenth-century Britain.

Repositioning Victorian Sciences

Repositioning Victorian Sciences PDF Author: David Clifford
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843312123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
An intriguing look at the marginal sciences of the nineteenth century and their influence on the culture of the period.

Reconstructing Nature

Reconstructing Nature PDF Author: John Hedley Brooke
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780567087256
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Shortlisted for the Templeton Foundation Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and Natural Sciences John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor discuss exciting developments in the sciences, whether in Big Bang cosmology, chaos theory or genetic engineering, in relation to moral and spiritual questions. Contemporary discussion can, however, be blind if it ignores previous forms of engagement between science and religion. In their Gifford Lectures the authors argue that not one but several historical approaches are required to achieve critical perspective and balanced understanding. Accordingly, each chapter demonstrates the value of a particular historical method. Ranging from alchemy to new-age philosophies, from the Galileo affair to the Darwinian controversies, this is an indispensable and highly accessible book for all interested in science and religion.