Reign of the Beast
Reign of the Beast

Author: Adrian Desmond

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2024-05-08

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1805112422

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In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man's institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil's Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull's pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.

The History of Geoconservation
The History of Geoconservation

Author: Cynthia V. Burek

Publisher: Geological Society of London

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9781862392540

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This book is the first to describe the history of geoconservation. It draws on experience from the UK, Europe and further afield, to explore topics including: what is geoconservation; where, when and how did it start; who was responsible; and how has it differed across the world? Geological and geomorphological features, processes, sites and specimens, provide a resource of immense scientific and educational importance. They also form the foundation for the varied and spectacular landscapes that help define national and local identity as well as many of the great tourism destinations. Mankind's activities, including contributing to enhanced climate change, pose many threats to this resource: the importance of safeguarding and managing it for future generations is now widely accepted as part of sustainable development. Geoconservation is an established and growing activity across the world, with more participants and a greater profile than ever before. This volume highlights a history of challenges, set-backs, successes and visionary individuals and provides a sound basis for taking geoconservation into the future.

Making the Geologic Now
Making the Geologic Now

Author: Elizabeth Ellsworth

Publisher:

Published: 2012-12-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780988234024

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Making the Geologic Now announces shifts in cultural sensibilities and practices. It offers early sightings of an increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for creative responses to conditions of the present moment. In the spirit of a broadside, this edited collection circulates images and short essays from over 40 artists, designers, architects, scholars, and journalists who are actively exploring and creatively responding to the geologic depth of "now." Contributors' ideas and works are drawn from architecture, design, contemporary philosophy and art. They are offered as test sites for what might become thinkable or possible if humans were to collectively take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer-as a partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences. A new cultural sensibility is emerging. As we struggle to understand and meet new material realities of earth and life on earth, it becomes increasingly obvious that the geologic is not just about rocks. We now cohabit with the geologic in unprecedented ways, in teeming assemblages of exchange and interaction among geologic materials and forces and the bio, cosmo, socio, political, legal, economic, strategic, and imaginary. As a reading and viewing experience, Making the Geologic Now is designed to move through culture, sounding an alert from the unfolding edge of the "geologic turn" that is now propagating through contemporary ideas and practices. Contributors include: Matt Baker, Jarrod Beck, Stephen Becker, Brooke Belisle, Jane Bennett, David Benque, Canary Project (Susannah Sayler, Edward Morris), Center for Land Use Interpretation, Brian Davis, Seth Denizen, Anthony Easton, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Valeria Federighi, William L. Fox, David Gersten, Bill Gilbert, Oliver Goodhall, John Gordon, Ilana Halperin, Lisa Hirmer, Rob Holmes, Katie Holten, Jane Hutton, Julia Kagan, Wade Kavanaugh, Oliver Kellhammer, Elizabeth Kolbert, Janike Kampevold Larsen, Jamie Kruse, William Lamson, Tim Maly, Geoff Manaugh, Don McKay, Rachel McRae, Brett Milligan, Christian MilNeil, Laura Moriarity, Stephen Nguyen, Erika Osborne, Trevor Paglen, Anne Reeve, Chris Rose, Victoria Sambunaris, Paul Lloyd Sargent, Antonio Stoppani, Rachel Sussman, Shimpei Takeda, Chris Taylor, Ryan Thompson, Etienne Turpin, Nicola Twilley, Bryan M. Wilson.

Essay on the Geography of Plants
Essay on the Geography of Plants

Author: Alexander von Humboldt

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-07-15

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0226360687

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The legacy of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) looms large over the natural sciences. His 1799–1804 research expedition to Central and South America with botanist Aimé Bonpland set the course for the great scientific surveys of the nineteenth century, and inspired such essayists and artists as Emerson, Goethe, Thoreau, Poe, and Church. The chronicles of the expedition were published in Paris after Humboldt’s return, and first among them was the 1807 “Essay on the Geography of Plants.” Among the most cited writings in natural history, after the works of Darwin and Wallace, this work appears here for the first time in a complete English-language translation. Covering far more than its title implies, it represents the first articulation of an integrative “science of the earth, ” encompassing most of today’s environmental sciences. Ecologist Stephen T. Jackson introduces the treatise and explains its enduring significance two centuries after its publication.

The Silver Canvas
The Silver Canvas

Author: Bates Lowry

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2000-02-03

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0892365366

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By the middle of the nineteenth century, the most common method of photography was the daguerreotype—Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s miraculous invention that captured in a camera visual images on a highly polished silver surface through exposure to light. In this book are presented nearly eighty masterpieces—many never previously published—from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive daguerreotype collection.