Browse Items (123 total)
- Collection: Curated Research
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Ice, Mud, and Blood
Ice, Mud and Blood moves through global climate history, and the accompanying science, more or less chronologically, weaving together diverse climate periods and expert knowledge about them. The first chapter “Greenhouse” is a bird’s eye view of…
Tags: climate, climate change
The Melting Ice Cellar: What Native Traditional Knowledge is Teaching Us about Global Warming and Environmental Change
The knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples have historically been rejected by many scientific fields. Climate science is just beginning to catch on to the value of Indigenous knowledge systems. Cochran and Geller discuss the overlaps and differences…
Mapping the Republic of Letters
This website provides interactive, visual tools that depict the vast networks of people and information during the Enlightenment. Using archived letters, travel logs, and other resources, it depicts visually the routes traveled by letters, people,…
Historia de los cambios climaticos
Excellent overall view, rooted in anthropology and ethnology, regarding how climate change affects cultures and social morals throughout the world. While an wide chronological perspective is the norm, there are excellent individual pieces dealing…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Botany: The Salutary Science
Cook's magisterial study explores Jean-Jacques Rousseau's abiding interest in botany and botanical science and the significance of his botanical writings in the context of the history of plant science. She gives a wide-ranging yet exquisitely nuanced…
Tags: botany, ecology, ethics, In-between, philosophy of nature, Rousseau, science
Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: the Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror
Crawford offers a new take on the rise of the Gothic in the late 18th century. Most interpretations see the gothic as a reaction to the upheavals of the revolutionary era. The new realities created by Revolution, so the argument goes, gave rise to…
Tags: art, destruction, disciplines, revolution, transgression
The Great Cat Massacre
Translated into 18 languages to date, this work is delightful read and also gets one thinking about the many ways in which we impose our own cultural assumptions, inaccurately, on previous eras; very useful as a pedagogical tool to get students out…
The Age of Global Warming
Overall survey, focuses more on the West (including Latin America, which not all "Western surveys" do) and the theorteical reasons underlying contemporary attitudes toward climate change; but takes into account, throughout the book, earlier attitudes…
Objectivity
Daston and Galison write the history of the emergence of scientific objectivity, beginning in the eighteenth century and proceeding into the present day. This magisterial study reveals practices of scientific image-making as constitutive of both…
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) and His Wife (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze, 1758-1836)
Reveals the gendered division of labor in many scientific households. Antoine, seated, is at work on a chemistry treatise; his wife, Marie-Anne, takes a break from her drawing board to look over his shoulder. Whereas Antoine is famous for his…
Tags: 18th century, disciplines, gender, science
Man a Machine
Julien Offray de La Mettrie was one of the earliest French Enlightenment materialists. Exiled from France after publishing a book (A Natural History of the Soul) arguing that psychical phenomena could be explained by examining bodily processes, he…
Tags: disciplines, ethics, materialism, medicine, philosophy, physics, physiology, science
The Passions of the Soul
Although this work has been overshadowed in the history of philosophy by Descartes’s more famous Meditations, it contains his most mature and influential discussion of mental states (specifically emotions) as the object of scientific (specifically…
Death and the Maiden
A play written by the Argentine-Chilean playwrite and activist, Ariel Dorfman. It tells the story of a woman confronting the man who allegedly took part in her torture under the previous, dictatorial regime. The woman's husband is a magistrate who is…
The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
Explores Enlightenment optimism about the perfectibility of mankind by looking at efforts to educate and "civilize" children. Chapters consider reactions to so-called "wild children"; utopian pedagogical schemes (including efforts to apply…
Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings
Brings together a collection of Du Châtelet's writing and shows that she was much more than Voltaire's mistress; she was a philosophe in her own right. This volume not only provides a good introduction to Du Châtelet but shows how ambitious…
Tags: 18th century, disciplines, education, female author, gender, science
The Enlightenment: A Genealogy
Edelstein argues for a narrative approach to the Englightenment, claiming that this was a story participants told themselves and each other. He traces shifts in disciplines of knowledge via changes in classical and modern authority, and the role of…
Tags: disciplines, libertinage, love
Sade: Queer Theorist
Examines Sade's multifaceted depiction of sexual desire, gender and biological sex and links this representation to queer theories which help better understand Sade's denial of binary representations of sexuality. The polyphonic definitions of…
Tags: disciplines, In-between, pornography, queer, queer studies, sexuality, upheavals, violence
Linnaeus, Natural History, and the Circulation of Knowledge
Contributors examine the various techniques, materials and methods that originated within the ‘Linnaean workshop’: paper technologies, publication strategies, and markets for specimens. Fresh analyses of the reception of Linnaeus’s work in Paris,…
Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual number is estimated to…
Tags: Africa, In-between, modernity, Slave trade, slavery
The Great Warming: The Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Demonstrates the effects of climate change from Central America to Europe during the 10th-15th centuries, as well as the later effects which this climate change had on multiple civilizations when these same places were colonized in the later 17th and…
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