Predicting the Weather
Predicting the Weather

Author: Katharine Anderson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0226019705

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Victorian Britain, with its maritime economy and strong links between government and scientific enterprises, founded an office to collect meteorological statistics in 1854 in an effort to foster a modern science of the weather. But as the office turned to prediction rather than data collection, the fragile science became a public spectacle, with its forecasts open to daily scrutiny in the newspapers. And meteorology came to assume a pivotal role in debates about the responsibility of scientists and the authority of science. Studying meteorology as a means to examine the historical identity of prediction, Katharine Anderson offers here an engrossing account of forecasting that analyzes scientific practice and ideas about evidence, the organization of science in public life, and the articulation of scientific values in Victorian culture. In Predicting the Weather, Anderson grapples with fundamental questions about the function, intelligibility, and boundaries of scientific work while exposing the public expectations that shaped the practice of science during this period. A cogent analysis of the remarkable history of weather forecasting in Victorian Britain, Predicting the Weather will be essential reading for scholars interested in the public dimensions of science.

Weather, Migration and the Scottish Diaspora
Weather, Migration and the Scottish Diaspora

Author: Graeme Morton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-28

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1000203751

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Why did large numbers of Scots leave a temperate climate to live permanently in parts of the world where greater temperature extreme was the norm? The long nineteenth century was a period consistently cooler than now, and Scotland remains the coldest of the British nations. Nineteenth-century meteorologists turned to environmental determinism to explain the persistence of agricultural shortage and to identify the atmospheric conditions that exacerbated the incidence of death and disease in the towns. In these cases, the logic of emigration and the benefits of an alternative climate were compelling. Emigration agents portrayed their favoured climate in order to pull migrants in their direction. The climate reasons, pressures and incentives that resulted in the movement of people have been neither straightforward nor uniform. There are known structural features that contextualize the migration experience, chief among them being economic and demographic factors. By building on the work of historical climatologists, and the availability of long-run climate data, for the first time the emigration history of Scotland is examined through the lens of the nation’s climate. In significant per capita numbers, the Scots left the cold country behind; yet the ‘homeland’ remained an unbreakable connection for the diaspora.

Earls Colne's Early Modern Landscapes
Earls Colne's Early Modern Landscapes

Author: Dolly MacKinnon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1317147251

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Essex village of Earls Colne boasts one of the most comprehensive collections of historical documents in Britain, and has been the subject of an intensive and ongoing research project to collate and computerise the surviving records. As such, Earls Colne is undoubtedly one of the most studied parishes in England. Yet whilst much is now known about the village and its inhabitants, little work has been done on the social relationships that bound the community together within its mental and physical landscape. As such, scholars will welcome Dr MacKinnon’s investigation into the social, political and cultural world of early modern England as represented by Earls Colne. The book provides a fresh approach to the study of the landscape of a seventeenth-century village by focussing on the relationships between political power and cultural artefacts. It examines how private, public and communal spaces within society were generated, gendered and governed, and how this was recorded and perpetuated in the records, names, and monuments of the parish and surrounding landscape. Yet whilst the ’elites’ tried to represent a select social landscape through their control of the local records and documents, these attempts were always counterbalanced by the less powerful members of the community who occupied and contested these spaces. By reconstructing the dynamics of Earls Colne through a careful reading and cross-referencing of the surviving documents, buildings and place names, this book offers a fascinating insight into how the sights and sounds of early modern society were imbued with the social relations of parish politics. As well as deepening our understanding of Earls Colne itself, the book offers historians the potential to revisit other local studies from a fresh perspective.