Nineteenth-Century Category
From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science
Posted on February 12, 2014 1 Comment
David Cahan’s (ed.) From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences (2003) takes stock of current historiography of the sciences in the “long nineteenth century.” In his Introduction, “looking at nineteenth-century science,” Cahan declares that “the study of nineteenth century science is flourishing.” During the nineteenth century, “the scientific enterprise underwent enormous and unprecedented intellectual and social […]
The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence
Posted on February 10, 2014 Leave a Comment
Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s The Triumph of Time (1966) is a “little book” with an enormous and exceedingly complex subject. It pretends to be no less than a survey of Victorians’ attitudes towards time. Buckley proposes to “test the truth” of John Stuart Mill’s suggestion, articulated in his The Spirit of the Ages (1831), that his own […]
Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science
Posted on January 31, 2014 Leave a Comment
“Science,” writes Nicolaas Rupke, “is not just a collection of abstract theories and general truths but a concrete practice with spatial dimensions.” It is, indeed, “situated knowledge.” Rupke comes to this conclusion in an Afterword for David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers’ (eds.) Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (2011). The essays in this volume “situate […]
Laura Otis’ Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2009)
Posted on January 24, 2014 Leave a Comment
It is perhaps fitting that my 100th post on this blog should be Laura Otis’ Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2009). My research began in September with historiographies of the Scientific Revolution, only to converge in recent months on nineteenth-century narratologies of “conflict” between religion and science, which, I believe, depended crucially […]
T.H. Huxley’s Puzzling use of Nature
Posted on January 19, 2014 Leave a Comment
Thomas Henry Huxley’s (1825-1895) use of the term “Nature” was curiously inconsistent. According to Oma Stanley, in his “T.H. Huxley’s Treatment of ‘Nature’” (1957), “all discussions of Nature made before 1871, Huxley treated the subject from the romantic point of view; and that from 1876 onward, his attitude was scientific.” In 1869 Huxley had translated […]
A Brief Note on Cambridge’s History of Science Volume VII: The Modern Social Sciences
Posted on January 17, 2014 Leave a Comment
Edited by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross, The Cambridge History of Science Volume VII: The Modern Social Sciences (2003) is the last of the current seven volume series. There is, however, a forthcoming eight volume, entitled The Cambridge History of Science Volume VIII: Modern Science in National and International Contexts, edited by Ronald L. […]
A Brief Note on Cambridge’s History of Science Volume VI : Modern Life and Earth Sciences
Posted on January 14, 2014 Leave a Comment
Perhaps the most engaging—and perhaps most relevant for my current research interests—installment of this series is Peter J. Bowler and John V. Pickstone’s (eds.) The Cambridge History of Science Volume VI: Modern Life and Earth Sciences (2009). This volume seeks to present an “overview of the development of a diverse range of sciences through a […]
Science, Progress and History: Essay Competition
Posted on January 8, 2014 Leave a Comment
The Science, Progress and History project, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation and the University of Queensland, and as part of the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland, seeks to explore questions at the interface of history and the natural sciences, with a focus on laws, patterns and […]
Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Secularism of George Jacob Holyoake
Posted on January 5, 2014 1 Comment
Wrapping up a series of essays I have been reading from The British Journal for the History of Science, I now come to two interrelated and complimentary essays by Ciaran Toal, “Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science: Sermons, Secularization and the Rhetoric of Conflict in the 1870s” (2012), and Michael Rectenwald, […]
Huxley, Agnosticism, and the X-Club
Posted on January 2, 2014 7 Comments
In assessing the “climate of opinion” in Victorian Britain, and more specifically the context of the evolution debates and narratives of conflict between science and religion that bolstered them, I have been engaging with a number of articles and books about prominent nineteenth-century dramatis personae, including Charles Darwin, Richard Owen, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, […]