Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series Editor: Bernard Lightman (York University); Editorial Board: Robert Brain (University of British Columbia); Pietro Corsi (University of Oxford); Shinjini Das (University of East Anglia); Fa-ti Fan (SUNY Binghamton); Bruce J. Hunt (University of Texas); Myles Jackson (Princeton Institute for Advanced Study); Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (University of Minnesota); Carlos López Beltrán (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas/UNAM); Lynn K. Nyhart (University of Wisconsin–Madison); Michael A. Osborne (Oregon State University); Gregory Radick (University of Leeds); Marc Rothenberg (Smithsonian Institution Archives); Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge); Jutta Schickore (Indiana University); Efram Sera-Shriar (Durham University & University of Copenhagen); Ann Shteir (York University); Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford); Robert Smith (University of Alberta); Jonathan R. Topham (University of Leeds)

An era of exciting and transformative scientific discoveries, the nineteenth century was also a period when significant features of the relationship between contemporary science and culture first assumed form. This book series includes studies of major developments within the disciplines—including geology, biology, botany, astronomy, physics, chemistry, medicine, technology, and mathematics—as well as themes within the social sciences, natural philosophy, natural history, the alternative sciences, and popular science. In addition, books in the series may examine science in relation to one or more of its many contexts, including literature, politics, religion, class, gender, colonialism and imperialism, material culture, and visual and print culture.

Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition Cover

Format:

Hardback Paperback

Pages: 368

ISBN: 9780822945819

Pub Date: 29 Oct 2019

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Illustrations: 30

Pages: 368

ISBN: 9780822967415

Pub Date: 28 Feb 2025

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis.

Format: Hardback

Pages: 312

ISBN: 9780822945529

Pub Date: 17 Sep 2019

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Illustrations: 21 b&w illustrations

Description:

Mass media in the late nineteenth century was full of news from Mars. In the wake of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 discovery of enigmatic dark, straight lines on the red planet, astronomers and the public at large vigorously debated the possibility that it might be inhabited. As rivalling scientific practitioners looked to marshal allies and sway public opinion—through newspapers, periodicals, popular books, exhibitions, and encyclopaedias—they exposed disagreements over how the discipline of astronomy should be organized and how it should establish acceptable conventions of discourse.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 232

ISBN: 9780822966081

Pub Date: 25 Jun 2019

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

Adolphe Quetelet was an influential astronomer and statistician whose controversial work inspired heated debate in European and American intellectual circles. In creating a science designed to explain the “average man,” he helped contribute to the idea of normal, most enduringly in his creation of the Quetelet Index, which came to be known as the Body Mass Index. Kevin Donnelly presents the first scholarly biography of Quetelet, exploring his contribution to quantitative reasoning, his place in nineteenth-century intellectual history, and his profound influence on the modern idea of average.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 432

ISBN: 9780822966111

Pub Date: 25 Jun 2019

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

The Life and Legend of James Wattoffers a deeper understanding of the work and character of the great eighteenth-century engineer. Stripping away layers of legend built over generations, David Philip Miller finds behind the heroic engineer a conflicted man often diffident about his achievements but also ruthless in protecting his inventions and ideas, and determined in pursuit of money and fame. A skilled and creative engineer, Watt was also a compulsive experimentalist drawn to natural philosophical inquiry, and a chemistry of heat underlay much of his work, including his steam engineering.

Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life Cover

Format: Hardback

Pages: 472

ISBN: 9780822945536

Pub Date: 18 Jun 2019

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Illustrations: 41 b&w illustrations

Description:

Attempts to distinguish a science of life at the turn of the nineteenth century faced a number of challenges. A central difficulty was clearly demarcating the living from the nonliving experimentally and conceptually. The more closely the boundaries between organic and inorganic phenomena were examined, the more they expanded and thwarted any clear delineation.

Format: Hardback

Pages: 320

ISBN: 9780822945512

Pub Date: 28 May 2019

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Illustrations: 8 b&w illustrations

Description:

Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or “diseases of modernity” resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various “neurotic remedies,” in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions.

Format: Hardback

Pages: 320

ISBN: 9780822945291

Pub Date: 25 May 2018

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Illustrations: 13 b&w images

Description:

With an Afterword by Theodore KoditschekA number of important developments and discoveries across the British Empire's imperial landscape during the nineteenth century invited new questions about human ancestry. The rise of secularism and scientific naturalism; new evidence, such as skeletal and archaeological remains; and European encounters with different people all over the world challenged the existing harmony between science and religion and threatened traditional biblical ideas about special creation and the timeline of human history. Advances in print culture and voyages of exploration also provided researchers with a wealth of material that contributed to their investigations into humanity’s past.

Kew Observatory and the Evolution of Victorian Science, 1840–1910 Cover

Format: Hardback

Pages: 336

ISBN: 9780822945260

Pub Date: 18 May 2018

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Illustrations: 11 b&w images

Description:

Kew Observatory was originally built in 1769 for King George III, a keen amateur astronomer, so that he could observe the transit of Venus. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a world-leading center for four major sciences: geomagnetism, meteorology, solar physics, and standardization. Long before government cutbacks forced its closure in 1980, the observatory was run by both major bodies responsible for the management of science in Britain: first the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and then, from 1871, the Royal Society.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 256

ISBN: 9780822965305

Pub Date: 26 Feb 2018

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

In the Victorian era, James Watt became an iconic engineer, but in his own time he was also an influential chemist. Miller examines Watt’s illustrious engineering career in light of his parallel interest in chemistry, arguing that Watt’s conception of steam engineering relied upon chemical understandings.Part I of the book—Representations—examines the way James Watt has been portrayed over time, emphasizing sculptural, pictorial and textual representations from the nineteenth century.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 302

ISBN: 9780822965299

Pub Date: 05 Feb 2018

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

This is an innovative and original socio-cultural study of the history of electricity during the late Victorian and Edward periods. Gooday shows how technology, authority and gender interacted in pre-World War I Britain. The rapid take-up of electrical light and domestic appliances on both sides of the Atlantic had a wide-ranging effect on consumer habits and the division of labour within the home.

Brewing Science, Technology and Print, 1700-1880 Cover

Format: Paperback

Pages: 320

ISBN: 9780822965312

Pub Date: 23 Jan 2018

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

How did the brewing of beer become a scientific process? Sumner explores this question by charting the theory and practice of the trade in Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.From an oral culture derived from home-based skills, brewing industrialized rapidly and developed an extensive trade literature, based increasingly on the authority of chemical experiment.

Format: Hardback

Pages: 368

ISBN: 9780822944751

Pub Date: 13 Jun 2017

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it - an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public - was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading naturalists, curators, and popular showmen were debating both how to display their knowledge and how and whether they should profit from scientific work; and when ideals of nationalism, class politics, and democracy were permeating the museum's walls.

Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870-1910 Cover

Format: Paperback

Pages: 288

ISBN: 9780822964766

Pub Date: 16 Dec 2016

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

From the late nineteenth century onwards religion gave way to science as the dominant force in society. This led to a questioning of the principle of free will—if the workings of the human mind could be reduced to purely physiological explanations, then what place was there for human agency and self-improvement? Smith takes an in-depth look at the problem of free will through the prism of different disciplines.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 256

ISBN: 9780822964728

Pub Date: 18 Nov 2016

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

The textbooks written by Adolphe Ganot (1804-1887) played a major role in shaping the way physics was taught in the nineteenth century. Ganot's books were translated from their original French into more than ten languages, including English, allowing their adoption as standard works in Britain and spreading their influence as far as North America, Australia, India and Japan.Simon's Franco-British case study looks at the role of Ganot's two textbooks: Traite elementaire de physique experimentale et appliquee (1851) and Cours de physique purement experimentale (1859), and their translations into English by Edmund Atkinson.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 360

ISBN: 9780822964360

Pub Date: 16 Sep 2016

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

This is the first in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon.

Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable Cover

Format: Hardback

Pages: 256

ISBN: 9780822945017

Pub Date: 01 Jun 2015

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Description:

The Victorians are known for their commitment to materialism, evidenced by the dominance of empiricism in the sciences and realism in fiction. Yet there were other strains of thinking during the period in the physical sciences, social sciences, and literature that privileged the spaces between the material and immaterial. This book examines how the emerging language of the “imponderable” helped Victorian writers and physicists make sense of new experiences of modernity.