Download or read book Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth century Natural History Exchange written by Jean O'Neill and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collinson's life is a microcosm of 18th-cent. natural history. A gardener and naturalist by avocation, he was what we would now call a facilitator in natural science, disseminating botanical and horticultural knowledge during the Enlightenment. He influenced the Comte de Buffon and Linnaeus. He found clients for the Phila. naturalist John Bartram. American plants populated great estates like those of the Dukes of Richmond, Norfolk, and Bedford, as well as the Chelsea Physic Garden, and the nurseries of James Gordon and Robert Furber. Botanic painters such as Mark Catesby and Georg Dionysius Ehret painted American plants in Collinson's garden. He had an unprecedented effect on the exchange of scientific info. on both sides of the Atlantic. Illus.
Download or read book A Caribbean Enlightenment written by April G. Shelford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities amongst White, male colonists in the eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean. For them, becoming 'enlightened' meant diversion, status seeking, satisfying curiosity about the tropical environment, and making sense of the brutal societies and the enslaved Africans.
Download or read book The Age of Scientific Naturalism written by Bernard Lightman and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physicist John Tyndall and his contemporaries were at the forefront of developing the cosmology of scientific naturalism during the Victorian period. They rejected all but physical laws as having any impact on the operations of human life and the universe. Contributors focus on the way Tyndall and his correspondents developed their ideas through letters, periodicals and scientific journals and challenge previously held assumptions about who gained authority, and how they attained and defended their position within the scientific community.
Download or read book European Physico theology 1650 c 1760 in Context written by Kaspar von Greyerz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physico-theology celebrated the observation of nature as a way toward the recognition of God as Creator and to demonstrate the compatibility of the biblical record with the new science. It was a crucial, albeit often underestimated element in the intellectual as well as socio-cultural establishment of the new science in western and central Europe beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. The importance of physico-theology in enhancing the acceptance of the new science among a broad educated public cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, this insight has not yet received much attention in the history of early modern science, chiefly because the history of physico-theology tends to highlight the activities of virtuosi rather than well-known scientists. A contribution to the history of knowledge, this is the first monograph in English on physico-theology on the European scale. It concentrates on two genres, the argument from design, and the palaeontological argument regarding the role of the Deluge in the formation of fossils. It does so without neglecting practice (correspondence and collecting). It pays considerable attention to the historical context, above all to the new image of God as a wise, benevolent, rather than unpredictable being, which provided the practitioners of physico-theology (including clergy, physicians, lawyers, and philologists) with a new and powerful argument. It draws attention to the predominantly Protestant nature of the phenomenon and looks at the longevity of the argument from design in Britain and the Netherlands, where its demise came about as late as the first half of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Global Goods and the Country House written by Jon Stobart and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2023-11-20 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global goods were central to the material culture of eighteenth-century country houses. Across Europe, mahogany furniture, Chinese wallpapers and Indian textiles formed the backdrop to genteel practices of drinking sweetened coffee, tea and chocolate from Chinese porcelain. They tied these houses and their wealthy owners into global systems of supply and the processes of colonialism and empire. Global Goods and the Country House builds on these narratives, and then challenges them by decentring our perspective. It offers a comparative framework that explores the definition, ownership and meaning of global goods outside the usual context of European imperial powers. What were global goods and what did they mean for wealthy landowners in places at the ‘periphery’ of Europe (Sweden and Wallachia), in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean, or in the extra-colonial context (Japan or Rajasthan)? By addressing these questions, this volume offers fresh insights into the multi-directional flow of goods and cultures that enmeshed the eighteenth-century world. And by placing these goods in their specific material context - from the English country house to the princely palaces of Rajasthan - we gain a better understanding of their use and meaning, and of their role in linking the global and the local.
Download or read book The Poetics of Natural History written by Christoph Irmscher and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-08 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly expanded and in full color, this groundbreaking book argues that early American natural historians had a distinctly poetic sensibility, producing work that had a visionary intensity. Covering naturalists from John James Audubon to PT Barnum, it considers not only natural history writing, but also illustrations, photographs, and actual collections of flora and fauna. Photography and all associated expenses made possible by a generous grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund
Download or read book Merpeople written by Vaughn Scribner and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2024-11-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated history of mermaids and mermen from the classics to cosplay. People have been fascinated by merpeople and merfolk since ancient times. From the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and the film Splash, myths, stories, and legends of half-human, half-fish creatures abound. In modern times “mermaiding” has gained popularity among cosplayers throughout the world. In Merpeople: A Human History, Vaughn Scribner traces the long history of mermaids and mermen, taking in a wide variety of sources and using 117 striking images. From film to philosophy, church halls to coffee houses, ancient myth to modern science, Scribner shows that mermaids and tritons are—and always have been—everywhere.
Download or read book Commercial Visions written by Dániel Margócsy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-10-09 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Commercial Visions," Daniel Margocsy shows how entrepreneurial science has been with us since the Scientific Revolution. Product marketing, patent litigation, and even ghostwriting pervaded natural history and anatomy, the big sciences of the early modern era, and the growth of global trade during the Dutch Golden Age gave rise to a transnational network of such entrepreneurial science, connecting natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in such cities as Amsterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Danzig. These practitioners were out to do business: they bought and sold exotica, preserved specimens, anatomical prints, and botanical atlases, and in their trade relied on particularly mercantile innovations, including postal networks, shipping, public transportation, and international banking. They also developed their own infrastructure for managing the long-distance monetary exchange of scientific knowledge and curiosities, while entrepreneurial rivalries, secrecy, and marketing strategies transformed the honorific, gift-based exchange system of the Republic of Letters into a competitive marketplace. Throughout this process, the Dutch naturalists contributed to the growth of modern science, imbuing its ethos and practices with financial undertones. "Commercial Visions "studies the interaction of commerce and science through the lens of recent scholarship on commodification, the circulation of knowledge, and the consumer revolution to argue that trade brought about a culture of scientific debate in the Netherlands that thoroughly influenced the visual epistemology of early modern science. Market competition pitted naturalists against each other, and compelled them to develop philosophical arguments to promote the representational claims of their imaging techniques. Margocsy s highly readable book will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in early modern science, culture, and art. "
Download or read book William Bartram s Visual Wonders written by Elizabeth A. Athens and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pennsylvania naturalist William Bartram (1739–1823) is best known as the author of a travelogue describing his botanizing journey through the American South in the late eighteenth century. Writing was not, however, Bartram’s only or even preferred method of recording the natural world around him. His deeply unconventional drawings, depicting sentient plants and hybrid organic forms, lie at the heart of his understanding of nature. With this book, Elizabeth Athens considers the strangeness of Bartram’s graphic enterprise, exploring the essential role his renderings played in his natural history. For Bartram, the making and interpretation of figures on a surface was a dynamic and collaborative relationship between nature, the observing artist-naturalist, and the audience. This book offers the first in-depth investigation of Bartram’s drawing practice as central to his understanding of nature. Through an examination of Bartram’s approach to botanical and zoological representation, Athens highlights the struggle between different modes of seeing nature in eighteenth-century Enlightenment science.
Download or read book The Philadelphia Country House written by Mark E. Reinberger and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-10-21 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cedar Grove, The Cliffs, Grumblethorpe, Mount Airy, Bartram's House and Garden: Accommodation of the Vernacular
Download or read book The Curious Mister Catesby written by E. Charles Nelson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1712, English naturalist Mark Catesby (1683–1749) crossed the Atlantic to Virginia. After a seven-year stay, he returned to England with paintings of plants and animals he had studied. They sufficiently impressed other naturalists that in 1722 several Fellows of the Royal Society sponsored his return to North America. There Catesby cataloged the flora and fauna of the Carolinas and the Bahamas by gathering seeds and specimens, compiling notes, and making watercolor sketches. Going home to England after five years, he began the twenty-year task of writing, etching, and publishing his monumental The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Mark Catesby was a man of exceptional courage and determination combined with insatiable curiosity and multiple talents. Nevertheless no portrait of him is known. The international contributors to this volume review Catesby’s biography alongside the historical and scientific significance of his work. Ultimately, this lavishly illustrated volume advances knowledge of Catesby’s explorations, collections, artwork, and publications in order to reassess his importance within the pantheon of early naturalists.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies written by Stephen Ward Angell and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides an in-depth survey of historical readings of Quakerism; a treatment of its key theological premises and its links with wider Christian thinking; an analysis of its distinctive ecclesiastical forms and practices; chapters on its social, economic, political, and ethical outcomes; as well as an extensive bibliography.
Download or read book Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries written by Tom Shachtman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Letter Writing written by Terttu Nevalainen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions in this book discuss letter-writing from 1400 to 1800, and the material studied ranges from the late medieval Paston Letters and the correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse to Early Modern English family letters and correspondence in natural history between England and North America in the eighteenth century. By bringing a set of corpus linguistic, discourse analytic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity, the articles both extend and complement the traditional letter-writing research in the history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical perspective. The articles in this book were first published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5:2 (2004), share a contextualised view of letters: whether approached from the perspective of language contact, social and discursive practices, intertextuality, audience design or linguistic politeness, letters are analysed as part of their specific familial, business or scientific network. Writing letters thus emerges as highly context-sensitive social interaction.
Download or read book Reconstructing Nature written by John Hedley Brooke and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in the U.K. by T&T Clark, expands on the authors' prestigious Glasgow Gifford Lectures of 1995-6. Brooke and Cantor herein examine the many different ways in which the relationship between science and religion has been presented throughout history. They contend that, in fact, neither science nor religion is reducible to some timeless "essence"--and they deftly criticize the various master-narratives that have been put forward in support of such "essentialist" theses. Along the way, they repeatedly demolish the clichés so typical of popular histories of the science and religion debate, demonstrating the impossibility of reducing these debates to a single narrative, or of narrowing this relationship to a paradigm of conflict.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment written by Mark G. Spencer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 1257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Colonials to Provincials written by Ned C. Landsman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume provides a succinct, analytical, well-conceived, and nicely written account of the development of colonial North American thought and culture from 1680 to the eve of the American Revolution. Not an anachronistic search for the origins of later American cultural forms, it situates the subject firmlv within a transatlantic context. The author emphasizes the extent to which improving communications and expanding connections helped to incorporate colonial settlers into a larger British world by providing them access and inviting them to become contributors to a burgeoning public culture of print, which consisted of newspapers, magazines, books, and 1etters.Whereas during the first seven decades of the seventeenth century, the colonies had been little more than crude and isolated outposts of English culture, from the late seventeenth century, he contends, they increasingly became like Scotland and Protestant Ireland, intellectual and cultural provinces of an expanding British Empire." -Jack P. Greene, Journal of American History
