Download or read book Science Culture and Politics in Britain 1750 1870 written by Jack Morrell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1997 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late 1960s, Jack Morrell's articles have stimulated a reorientation of the historiography of science. He showed by example, in the studies now gathered here, how the social, political, economic, and institutional aspects of science could be integrated with its content. In his writings he assumed that science was a socially organised attempt to set and solve problems concerning the natural world, and that historians should take cognisance of everything which affected that activity - without down-grading published knowledge, its end-product. Specific topics in this volume include the institutions of British science, especially universities, laboratories, and research schools, the careers of the scientists, and the impact of science in the north of England and, especially, in Scotland.
Download or read book Evolution and the Victorians written by Jonathan Conlin and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Scientific Culture and Urbanisation in Industrialising Britain written by Ian Inkster and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ian Inkster’s intent in these studies is to move beyond the high culture and expertise of science towards the construction of the culture of urban communities. The work draws on a mass of detailed research and focuses on Britain's social and cultural advantages over other industrialising nations in the years prior to the Great Exhibition of 1851, an advantage which was not created by any single decision, nor by any explicit investment effect. Out of urban culture emerged a public sphere and an information system within which class divisions were abrogated; at the same time the relations between information and technique became complex and decidedly non-linear. So was created a social asset drawn upon by business interests, technicians, tinkerers and inventors throughout the period, and for some considerable time beyond it. Industrial Britain was made from diverse materials, amongst which were those fabricated in the course of cultural dissent and social ambition.
Download or read book Scientific Institutions and Practice in France and Britain c 1700 c 1870 written by Maurice Crosland and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second collection of studies by Maurice Crosland has as a first theme the differences in the style and organisation of scientific activity in Britain and France in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Science was more closely controlled in France, notably by the Paris Academy of Sciences, and the work of provincial amateurs much less prominent than in Britain. The most dramatic change in any branch of science during this period was in chemistry, largely through the work of Lavoisier and his colleagues, the focus of several articles here, and the dominance of this group caused considerable resentment outside France, not least by Joseph Priestley. The issue of authority in science emerges again, within France under the rule of Napoleon, in a study of the exceptional power exercised by the great mathematician Laplace both in theoretical science and in academic politics. This exploration of organisation and power is complemented by a comparative study of the practice of early 'physics' and chemistry and their different reliance on laboratories. This raises the question of whether chemistry provided a model for later experimental work in other sciences, both through the construction of pioneering laboratories and in establishing early schools of research.
Download or read book From Atoms to Molecules written by Colin A. Russell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of this volume by Professor Russell is the history of organic chemistry, which arose improbably out of early speculations about the construction of chemical compounds, and in particular their electrochemical nature. The rise of electrochemistry and the work of Berzelius were critical in this regard, and receive much attention in the first few chapters in this book. Aspects of the contributions of Frankland (fully explored elsewhere) and those of Kekulê and Hofmann are considered, together with the miscellaneous functions of organic synthesis and the origins of conformational analysis. Questions of chemical organisation are germane to the whole sequence of events and are briefly summarized before the whole last hundred years of organic chemistry are placed in historical perspective.
Download or read book Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain written by Bernard Lightman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have tended to portray T.H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and their allies as the dominant cultural authority in the second half of the 19th century. Defenders of Darwin and his theory of evolution, these men of science are often seen as a potent force for the secularization of British intellectual and social life. In this collection of essays Bernard Lightman argues that historians have exaggerated the power of scientific naturalism to undermine the role of religion in middle and late-Victorian Britain. The essays deal with the evolutionary naturalists, especially the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, the physicist John Tyndall, and the philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer. But they look also at those who criticized this influential group of elite intellectuals, including aristocratic spokesman A. J Balfour, the novelist Samuel Butler, and the popularizer of science Frank Buckland. Focusing on the theme of the limitations of the cultural power of evolutionary naturalism, the volume points to the enduring strength of religion in Britain in the latter half of the 19th century.
Download or read book Modern Britain Third Edition written by Edward Royle and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the first edition: 'Royle calls on an impressive range of materials (supported by an excellent bibliography) to offer a judicious review of most of the issues currently confronted by social historians. His agenda contains both traditional and novel elements [...] all are presented with admirable clarity and balance. [...] A volume which shows an astonishing command of such a wide range of material will long prove essential reading.' Times Literary Supplement This popular work provides an in-depth historical background to issues of contemporary concern, tracing developments over the past two and a half centuries. It promotes accessibility by adopting a thematic approach, with each theme treated chronologically. Major themes are chosen partly by their importance to an understanding of the past and partly by their relevance to students of contemporary Britain - rather than by imposing current fashions in historical study on the past. Thoroughly revised, the third edition of Modern Britain reviews and brings up to date the content to take account of developments since 1997 and reconsiders emphases and interpretations in light of more recent scholarship. It incorporates new currents in historical writing on matters such as the language of class, the position of women, and the revolution worked by the Internet and mobile technologies. Modern Britain is vital reading for students of history and the social and political sciences.
Download or read book The Development of Science and Technology in Nineteenth Century Britain written by Donald Cardwell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2003. Donald Cardwell's interest in the inter-relationships between science, technology, education and society are exemplified in the selection of his studies and essays brought together here. The first section deals with the rise of scientific education in Britain, comparing it with that on the Continent. The next studies explore the development of the scientific understanding of power, especially steam power, and its application in the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution. The final section looks at learned societies, and in particular at Manchester, making explicit a theme running through many of the articles - the reasons why science, society and education came together to make this city what he called 'the centre of the industrial revolution'.
Download or read book The Practice of British Geology 1750 1850 written by H. S. Torrens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geology is the most historical of all sciences. Yet its own history remains neglected, especially the many aspects of how geology was practised in the past. This volume analyses the careers of some important practical figures in English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish geology between 1750 and 1850. These include people who would have regarded themselves more as mining engineers (or 'coal viewers' as they were then called in the vital coal industry) or 'mineral surveyors' as today's mineral prospectors were first called (from 1808), or even inventors. Their expertise, in the land which led the industrial revolution, took them all over the world. Those included here went to Italy, and South (Peru) and North America (Virginia and Canada). The practice of geology, through the search for mines and minerals, has been much less attended to by historians than the geology which was undertaken by leisured amateurs - even though practical geology was as important in the past as the oil industry is today.
Download or read book An Emerging Modern World 1750 1870 written by Sebastian Conrad and published by A History of the World. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of human history, states and regions were connected by long-distance commerce and war, yet they developed essentially separately. The century after 1750 marked a major shift. An Emerging Modern World, fourth in the six-volume series A History of the World, charts this transformative period outside the West.
Download or read book Worlds Before Adam written by Martin J. S. Rudwick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-05 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scientists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth—and the relatively recent arrival of human life. The geologists of the period, many of whom were devout believers, agreed about this vast timescale. But despite this apparent harmony between geology and Genesis, these scientists still debated a great many questions: Had the earth cooled from its origin as a fiery ball in space, or had it always been the same kind of place as it is now? Was prehuman life marked by mass extinctions, or had fauna and flora changed slowly over time? The first detailed account of the reconstruction of prehuman geohistory, Martin J. S. Rudwick’s Worlds Before Adam picks up where his celebrated Bursting the Limits of Time leaves off. Here, Rudwick takes readers from the post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe to the early years of Britain’s Victorian age, chronicling the staggering discoveries geologists made during the period: the unearthing of the first dinosaur fossils, the glacial theory of the last ice age, and the meaning of igneous rocks, among others. Ultimately, Rudwick reveals geology to be the first of the sciences to investigate the historical dimension of nature, a model that Charles Darwin used in developing his evolutionary theory. Featuring an international cast of colorful characters, with Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell playing major roles and Darwin appearing as a young geologist, Worlds Before Adam is a worthy successor to Rudwick’s magisterial first volume. Completing the highly readable narrative of one of the most momentous changes in human understanding of our place in the natural world, Worlds Before Adam is a capstone to the career of one of the world’s leading historians of science.
Download or read book Imperial Nature written by Jim Endersby and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the first—and most successful—British men of science to become a full-time professional. He was also, Jim Endersby argues, the perfect embodiment of Victorian science. A vivid picture of the complex interrelationships of scientific work and scientific ideas, Imperial Nature gracefully uses one individual’s career to illustrate the changing world of science in the Victorian era. By analyzing Hooker’s career, Endersby offers vivid insights into the everyday activities of nineteenth-century naturalists, considering matters as diverse as botanical illustration and microscopy, classification, and specimen transportation and storage, to reveal what they actually did, how they earned a living, and what drove their scientific theories. What emerges is a rare glimpse of Victorian scientific practices in action. By focusing on science’s material practices and one of its foremost practitioners, Endersby ably links concerns about empire, professionalism, and philosophical practices to the forging of a nineteenth-century scientific identity.
Download or read book Ways of Knowing written by John V. Pickstone and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ways of Knowing, John V. Pickstone provides a new and accessible framework for understanding science, technology, and medicine (STM) in the West from the Renaissance to the present. Pickstone's approach has four key features. First, he synthesizes the long-term histories and philosophies of disciplines that are normally studied separately. Second, he dissects STM into specific ways of knowing—natural history, analysis, and experimentalism—with separate but interlinked elements. Third, he explores these ways of knowing as forms of work related to our various technologies for making, mending, and destroying. And finally, he relates scientific and technical knowledges to popular understandings and to politics. Covering an incredibly wide range of subjects, from minerals and machines to patients and pharmaceuticals, and from experimental physics to genetic engineering, Pickstone's Ways of Knowing challenges the reader to reexamine traditional conceptualizations of the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, technology, and medicine.
Download or read book Robert Brown and Mungo Park written by Joel Schwartz and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explorer-naturalists Robert Brown and Mungo Park played a pivotal role in the development of natural history and exploration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This work is a fresh examination of the lives and careers of Brown and Park and their impact on natural history and exploration. Brown and Park were part of a group of intrepid naturalists who brought back some of the flora and fauna they encountered, drawings of what they observed, and most importantly, their ideas. The educated public back home was able to gain an understanding of the diversity in nature. This eventually led to the development of new ways of regarding the natural world and the eventual development of a coherent theory of organic evolution. This book considers these naturalists, Brown, Park, and their contemporaries, from the perspective of the Scottish Enlightenment. Brown’s investigations in natural history created a fertile environment for breakthroughs in taxonomy, cytology, and eventually evolution. Brown’s pioneering work in plant taxonomy allowed biologists to look at the animal and plant kingdoms differently. Park’s adventures stimulated significant discoveries in exploration. Brown and Park’s adventures formed a bridge to such journeys as Charles Darwin’s voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, which led to a revolution in biology and full explication of the theory of evolution.
Download or read book The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain written by William Christie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its first issue, published on the 10th October 1802, Francis Jeffrey's "Edinburgh Review" established a strong reputation and exerted a powerful influence. This is a literary study of the "Edinburgh Review" for over fifty years. It contextualizes the periodical within the culture wars of the Romantic era.
Download or read book Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism written by John van Wyhe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a reassessment of phrenology, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism sheds light on all kinds of works in Victorian Britain and America which have previously been unnoticed or were simply referred to with a vague 'naturalism of the times' explanation. It is often assumed that the scientific naturalism familiar in late nineteenth century writers such as T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall are the effects of a 'Darwinian revolution' unleashed in 1859 on an unsuspecting world following the publication of The Origin of Species. Yet it can be misleading to view Darwin's work in isolation, without locating it in the context of a well established and vigorous debate concerning scientific naturalism. Throughout the nineteenth century intellectuals and societies had been discussing the relationship between nature and man, and the scientific and religious implications thereof. At the forefront of these debates were the advocates of phrenology, who sought to apply their theories to a wide range of subjects, from medicine and the treatment of the insane, to education, theology and even economic theories. Showing how ideas about naturalism and the doctrine of natural laws were born in the early phrenology controversies in the 1820s, this book charts the spread of such views. It argues that one book in particular, The Constitution of Man in Relation to External Objects (1828) by George Combe, had an enormous influence on scientific thinking and the popularity of the 'naturalistic movement'. The Constitution was one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, being published continuously from 1828 to 1899, and selling more than 350,000 copies throughout the world, many times more than Dawin's The Origin of Species. By restoring Combe and his work to centre stage it provides modern scholars with a more accurate picture of the Victorians' view of their place in Nature.
Download or read book Sir William C Macdonald written by William Fong and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2007-08-24 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born into a prominent Scottish family on Prince Edward Island, Macdonald rejected his Catholic upbringing and left home when he was eighteen. After three years in Boston as a bookkeeper he headed to Montreal and began to work as a commission agent. By 1868 Macdonald had become the leading manufacturer of chewing tobacco in Canada, and by 1885 he may have been the richest person in the country.
