Author: Patricia Fara Publisher: Icon Books ISBN: 1840464445 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
"Enticing ... with a sharp eye for 18th-century mores, this is an engrossing exploration of the growth of the British Empire." Good Book Guide
Author: Londa Schiebinger Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674043278 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life yet they are often at the center of high intrigue. In the eighteenth century, epic scientific voyages were sponsored by European imperial powers to explore the natural riches of the New World, and uncover the botanical secrets of its people. Bioprospectors brought back medicines, luxuries, and staples for their king and country. Risking their lives to discover exotic plants, these daredevil explorers joined with their sponsors to create a global culture of botany. But some secrets were unearthed only to be lost again. In this moving account of the abuses of indigenous Caribbean people and African slaves, Schiebinger describes how slave women brewed the "peacock flower" into an abortifacient, to ensure that they would bear no children into oppression. Yet, impeded by trade winds of prevailing opinion, knowledge of West Indian abortifacients never flowed into Europe. A rich history of discovery and loss, Plants and Empire explores the movement, triumph, and extinction of knowledge in the course of encounters between Europeans and the Caribbean populations.
Author: Patricia Fara Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192588109 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Dr Erasmus Darwin seemed an innocuous Midlands physician, a respectable stalwart of eighteenth-century society. But there was another side to him. Botanist, physician, Lunar inventor and popular poet, Darwin was internationally renowned for extraordinary poems explaining his theories about sex and science. Yet he became a target for the political classes, the victim of a sustained and vitriolic character assassination by London's most savage satirists. Intrigued, prize-winning historian Patricia Fara set out to investigate why Darwin had provoked such fierce intellectual and political reaction. Inviting her readers to accompany her, she embarked on what turned out to be a circuitous and serendipitous journey. Her research led her to discover a man who possessed, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'perhaps a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe.' His evolutionary ideas influenced his grandson Charles, were banned by the Vatican, and scandalized his reactionary critics. But for modern readers he shines out as an impassioned Enlightenment reformer who championed the abolition of slavery, the education of women, and the optimistic ideals of the French Revolution. As she tracks down her quarry, Patricia Fara uncovers a ferment of dangerous ideas that terrified the establishment, inspired the Romantics, and laid the ground for Victorian battles between faith and science.
Author: Jordan Goodman Publisher: William Collins ISBN: 9780007578863 Category : Languages : en Pages : 560
Book Description
'Based on meticulous research in original sources ... Goodman illustrates vividly how adept [Banks] was ... Shining a light on individuals whose achievements are relatively uncelebrated' Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books A bold new history of how botany and global plant collecting - centred at Kew Gardens and driven by Joseph Banks - transformed the earth. Botany was the darling and the powerhouse of the eighteenth century. As European ships ventured across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, discovery bloomed. Bounties of new plants were brought back, and their arrival meant much more than improved flowerbeds - it offered a new scientific frontier that would transform Europe's industry, medicine, eating and drinking habits, and even fashion. Joseph Banks was the dynamo for this momentous change. As botanist for James Cook's great voyage to the South Pacific on the Endeavour, Banks collected plants on a vast scale, armed with the vision - as a child of the Enlightenment - that to travel physically was to advance intellectually. His thinking was as intrepid as Cook's seafaring: he commissioned radically influential and physically daring expeditions such as those of Francis Masson to the Cape Colony, George Staunton to China, George Caley to Australia, William Bligh to Tahiti and Jamaica, among many others. Jordan Goodman's epic history follows these high seas adventurers and their influence in Europe, as well as taking us back to the early years of Kew Gardens, which Banks developed devotedly across the course of his life, transforming it into one of the world's largest and most diverse botanical gardens. In a rip-roaring global expedition, based on original sources in many languages, Goodman gives a momentous history of how the discoveries made by Banks and his collectors advanced scientific understanding around the world.
Author: Mytheli Sreenivas Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295748850 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.
Author: Peter Boag Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295749997 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
On an autumn day in 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery shot his parents and a neighbor in a gruesome act that reverberated beyond the small confines of Montgomery's Oregon farming community. The dispassionate slaying and Montgomery's consequent hanging exposed the fault lines of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society and revealed the burdens of pioneer narratives boys of the time inherited. In Pioneering Death, Peter Boag examines the Brownsville parricide as an allegory for the destabilizing transitions within the rural United States at the end of the nineteenth century. While pioneer families celebrated and memorialized founders of western white settler society, their children faced a present and future in frightening decline. Connecting a fascinating true-crime story with the broader forces that produced the murders, Boag uncovers how Loyd's violent acts reflected the brutality of American colonizing efforts, the anxieties of global capitalism, and the buried traumas of childhood in the American West.
Author: Londa Schiebinger Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812293479 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 353
Book Description
In the early modern world, botany was big science and big business, critical to Europe's national and trade ambitions. Tracing the dynamic relationships among plants, peoples, states, and economies over the course of three centuries, this collection of essays offers a lively challenge to a historiography that has emphasized the rise of modern botany as a story of taxonomies and "pure" systems of classification. Charting a new map of botany along colonial coordinates, reaching from Europe to the New World, India, Asia, and other points on the globe, Colonial Botany explores how the study, naming, cultivation, and marketing of rare and beautiful plants resulted from and shaped European voyages, conquests, global trade, and scientific exploration. From the earliest voyages of discovery, naturalists sought profitable plants for king and country, personal and corporate gain. Costly spices and valuable medicinal plants such as nutmeg, tobacco, sugar, Peruvian bark, peppers, cloves, cinnamon, and tea ranked prominently among the motivations for European voyages of discovery. At the same time, colonial profits depended largely on natural historical exploration and the precise identification and effective cultivation of profitable plants. This volume breaks new ground by treating the development of the science of botany in its colonial context and situating the early modern exploration of the plant world at the volatile nexus of science, commerce, and state politics. Written by scholars as international as their subjects, Colonial Botany uncovers an emerging cultural history of plants and botanical practices in Europe and its possessions.
Author: Londa L. Schiebinger Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 9780813535319 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature--one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women.
Author: Patricia Fara Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1446435164 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
'Had God intended Women merely as a finer sort of cattle, he would not have made them reasonable.' Writing in 1673, Bathsua Makin was one of the first women to insist that girls should receive a scientific education. Despite the efforts of Makin and her successors, women were excluded from universities until the end of the nineteenth century, yet they found other ways to participate in scientific projects. Taking a fresh look at history, Pandora's Breeches investigates how women contributed to scientific progress. As well as collaborating in home-based research, women corresponded with internationally-renowned scholars, hired tutors, published their own books and translated and simplified important texts, such as Newton's book on gravity. They played essential roles in work frequently attributed solely to their husbands, fathers or friends.
Author: Greta LaFleur Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 1421426439 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
How natural history made sex scientific in the eighteenth century. If sexology—the science of sex—came into being sometime in the nineteenth century, then how did statesmen, scientists, and everyday people make meaning out of sex before that point? In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Greta LaFleur demonstrates that eighteenth-century natural history—the study of organic life in its environment—actually provided the intellectual foundations for the later development of the scientific study of sex. Natural historians understood the human body to be a "porous envelope," eminently vulnerable to its environment. Yet historians of sexuality have tended to rely on archival evidence of genital-based or otherwise bodily sex acts for source material. Through careful readings of both elite natural history texts and popular print forms that circulated widely in the British North American colonies—among them Barbary captivity, execution, cross-dressing, and anti-vice narratives—LaFleur traces the development of a broad knowledge of sexuality defined in terms of the dynamic relationship between the human and the natural, social, physical, and climatic milieu. At the heart of this book is the question of how to produce a history of sexuality for an era in which modern vocabularies for sex and desire were unavailable. LaFleur demonstrates how environmental logic was used to explain sexual behavior on a broad scale, not just among the educated elite who wrote and read natural historical texts. LaFleur reunites the history of sexuality with the history of race, demonstrating how they were bound to one another by the emergence of the human sciences. Ultimately, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America not only rewrites all dominant scholarly narratives of eighteenth-century sexual behavior but also poses a major intervention into queer theoretical understandings of the relationship between sex and the subject.
Author: Patricia Fara
Author: Londa Schiebinger
Author: Patricia Fara
Author: Jordan Goodman
Author: Mytheli Sreenivas
Author: Peter Boag
Author: Londa Schiebinger
Author: Londa L. Schiebinger
Author: Patricia Fara
Author: Greta LaFleur