Author: Sue Ann Prince
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9780871699343
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 168
Book Description
The Curatorial Department of the American Philosophical Society presents a catalogue of the exhibition held in Philosophical Hall from June 2003 through December 2004. The exhibit focuses on the blending of art and science in the study of natural history in North America. It explores the cultural assumptions that governed the practice of natural history on the North American continent in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Focusing on the study of living things -- plants, animals, and indigenous peoples -- it looks at how and why Euro-Americans of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods went about explaining the world the way they did. Exhibit items include historical specimens, manuscript materials, first-edition books, and art work.
Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge
Author: Sue Ann Prince
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9780871699343
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 168
Book Description
The Curatorial Department of the American Philosophical Society presents a catalogue of the exhibition held in Philosophical Hall from June 2003 through December 2004. The exhibit focuses on the blending of art and science in the study of natural history in North America. It explores the cultural assumptions that governed the practice of natural history on the North American continent in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Focusing on the study of living things -- plants, animals, and indigenous peoples -- it looks at how and why Euro-Americans of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods went about explaining the world the way they did. Exhibit items include historical specimens, manuscript materials, first-edition books, and art work.
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9780871699343
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 168
Book Description
The Curatorial Department of the American Philosophical Society presents a catalogue of the exhibition held in Philosophical Hall from June 2003 through December 2004. The exhibit focuses on the blending of art and science in the study of natural history in North America. It explores the cultural assumptions that governed the practice of natural history on the North American continent in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Focusing on the study of living things -- plants, animals, and indigenous peoples -- it looks at how and why Euro-Americans of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods went about explaining the world the way they did. Exhibit items include historical specimens, manuscript materials, first-edition books, and art work.
Epiphany in the Wilderness
Author: Karen R. Jones
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1457197545
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379
Book Description
"Whether fulfilling subsistence needs or featured in stories of grand adventure, hunting loomed large in the material and the imagined landscape of the nineteenth-century West. Epiphany in the Wilderness explores the social, political, economic, and environmental dynamics of hunting on the frontier in three “acts,” using performance as a trail guide and focusing on the production of a “cultural ecology of the chase” in literature, art, photography, and taxidermy.Using the metaphor of the theater, Jones argues that the West was a crucial stage that framed the performance of the American character as an independent, resourceful, resilient, and rugged individual. The leading actor was the all-conquering masculine hunter hero, the sharpshooting man of the wilderness who tamed and claimed the West with each provident step. Women were also a significant part of the story, treading the game trails as plucky adventurers and resilient homesteaders and acting out their exploits in autobiographical accounts and stage shows.Epiphany in the Wilderness informs various academic debates surrounding the frontier period, including the construction of nature as a site of personal challenge, gun culture, gender adaptations and the crafting of the masculine wilderness hero figure, wildlife management and consumption, memorializing and trophy-taking, and the juxtaposition of a closing frontier with an emerging conservation movement."
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1457197545
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379
Book Description
"Whether fulfilling subsistence needs or featured in stories of grand adventure, hunting loomed large in the material and the imagined landscape of the nineteenth-century West. Epiphany in the Wilderness explores the social, political, economic, and environmental dynamics of hunting on the frontier in three “acts,” using performance as a trail guide and focusing on the production of a “cultural ecology of the chase” in literature, art, photography, and taxidermy.Using the metaphor of the theater, Jones argues that the West was a crucial stage that framed the performance of the American character as an independent, resourceful, resilient, and rugged individual. The leading actor was the all-conquering masculine hunter hero, the sharpshooting man of the wilderness who tamed and claimed the West with each provident step. Women were also a significant part of the story, treading the game trails as plucky adventurers and resilient homesteaders and acting out their exploits in autobiographical accounts and stage shows.Epiphany in the Wilderness informs various academic debates surrounding the frontier period, including the construction of nature as a site of personal challenge, gun culture, gender adaptations and the crafting of the masculine wilderness hero figure, wildlife management and consumption, memorializing and trophy-taking, and the juxtaposition of a closing frontier with an emerging conservation movement."
The Attention of a Traveller
Author: Kathryn H. Braund
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817321292
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
"Brings together and highlights some of the latest and most engaging work on William Bartram and efforts to commemorate his journey through the disparate region that would become the Southeastern US"--
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817321292
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
"Brings together and highlights some of the latest and most engaging work on William Bartram and efforts to commemorate his journey through the disparate region that would become the Southeastern US"--
Trying Leviathan
Author: D. Graham Burnett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400833981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero here takes sides in one of the great controversies of the early nineteenth century--one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts of New York City. In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular--and biblically sanctioned--view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake. Burnett vividly recreates the trial, during which a parade of experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of interior anatomy--and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God's creatures. When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast churned both the natural and social orders--and not everyone would survive.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400833981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero here takes sides in one of the great controversies of the early nineteenth century--one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts of New York City. In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular--and biblically sanctioned--view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake. Burnett vividly recreates the trial, during which a parade of experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of interior anatomy--and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God's creatures. When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast churned both the natural and social orders--and not everyone would survive.
Common Phantoms
Author: Alicia Puglionesi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503612783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371
Book Description
Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. Common Phantoms brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences. Drawing on previously untapped archives of participant-reported data, Alicia Puglionesi recounts how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. A vast though flawed experiment in democratic science, psychical research gave participants valuable tools with which to study their experiences on their own terms. Academic psychology would ultimately disown this effort as both a scientific failure and a remnant of magical thinking, but its challenge to the limits of science, the mind, and the soul still reverberates today.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503612783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371
Book Description
Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. Common Phantoms brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences. Drawing on previously untapped archives of participant-reported data, Alicia Puglionesi recounts how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. A vast though flawed experiment in democratic science, psychical research gave participants valuable tools with which to study their experiences on their own terms. Academic psychology would ultimately disown this effort as both a scientific failure and a remnant of magical thinking, but its challenge to the limits of science, the mind, and the soul still reverberates today.
Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds
Author: Mackenzie Cooley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000873021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 557
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.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000873021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 557
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.
Transporting Visions
Author: Jennifer L. Roberts
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520251849
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
"Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation."
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520251849
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
"Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation."
Rendering Nature
Author: Marguerite S. Shaffer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812247256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
We exist at a moment during which the entangled challenges facing the human and natural worlds confront us at every turn, whether at the most basic level of survival—health, sustenance, shelter—or in relation to our comfort-driven desires. As demand for resources both necessary and unnecessary increases, understanding how nature and culture are interconnected matters more than ever. Bridging the fields of environmental history and American studies, Rendering Nature examines the surprising interconnections between nature and culture in distinct places, times, and contexts over the course of American history. Divided into four themes—animals, bodies, places, and politics—the essays span a diverse array of locations and periods: from antebellum slave society to atomic testing sites, from gorillas in Central Africa to river runners in the Grand Canyon, from white sun-tanning enthusiasts to Japanese American incarcerees, from taxidermists at the 1893 World's Fair to tents on Wall Street in 2011. Together they offer new perspectives and conceptual tools that can help us better understand the historical realities and current paradoxes of our environmental predicament. Contributors: Thomas G. Andrews, Connie Y. Chiang, Catherine Cocks, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Finis Dunaway, John Herron, Andrew Kirk, Frieda Knobloch, Susan A. Miller, Brett Mizelle, Marguerite S. Shaffer, Phoebe S. K. Young.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812247256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
We exist at a moment during which the entangled challenges facing the human and natural worlds confront us at every turn, whether at the most basic level of survival—health, sustenance, shelter—or in relation to our comfort-driven desires. As demand for resources both necessary and unnecessary increases, understanding how nature and culture are interconnected matters more than ever. Bridging the fields of environmental history and American studies, Rendering Nature examines the surprising interconnections between nature and culture in distinct places, times, and contexts over the course of American history. Divided into four themes—animals, bodies, places, and politics—the essays span a diverse array of locations and periods: from antebellum slave society to atomic testing sites, from gorillas in Central Africa to river runners in the Grand Canyon, from white sun-tanning enthusiasts to Japanese American incarcerees, from taxidermists at the 1893 World's Fair to tents on Wall Street in 2011. Together they offer new perspectives and conceptual tools that can help us better understand the historical realities and current paradoxes of our environmental predicament. Contributors: Thomas G. Andrews, Connie Y. Chiang, Catherine Cocks, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Finis Dunaway, John Herron, Andrew Kirk, Frieda Knobloch, Susan A. Miller, Brett Mizelle, Marguerite S. Shaffer, Phoebe S. K. Young.
A Temperate Empire
Author: Anya Zilberstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190206594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
"A Temperate Empire explores the ways that colonists studied and tried to remake local climates in New England and Nova Scotia according to their plans for settlement and economic growth."--
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190206594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
"A Temperate Empire explores the ways that colonists studied and tried to remake local climates in New England and Nova Scotia according to their plans for settlement and economic growth."--
Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries
Author: Tom Shachtman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1137278250
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Book Description
A fresh exploration of the scientific pursuits of the Founding Fathers that reveals their science as critical to the great political "experiment" of the day
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1137278250
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Book Description
A fresh exploration of the scientific pursuits of the Founding Fathers that reveals their science as critical to the great political "experiment" of the day