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Examines the phenomenon of human exhibitions in nineteenth-century Britain and considers how this legacy informs understandings of race and empire today.
The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of their preoccupations with the past were unprecedented and of lasting importance. The Victorians paved the way for our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain’s most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past. Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to fresh debates, while seemingly well-known histories were thrown into confusion by novel tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of the many, not the few. Time Travelers is a book about the myriad ways in which Victorians approached the past, offering a vivid picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.
Introduction: Why Extinction Matters -- The Meaning of Extinction: Catastrophe, Equilibrium, and Diversity -- Extinction in a Victorian Key -- Catastrophe and Modernity -- Extinction in the Shadow of the Bomb -- The Asteroid and the Dinosaur -- A Sixth Extinction? The Making of a Biodiversity Crisis -- Epilogue: Extinction in the Anthropocene.
These essays examine the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences.
Curating empire explores the diverse roles played by museums and their curators in moulding and representing the British imperial experience. This collection demonstrates how individuals, their curatorial practices, and intellectual and political agendas influenced the development of a variety of museums across the globe. Taken together, these contributions suggest that museums are not just sites for accessing history but need to be considered as historical sites of significance in themselves. Individual essays examine the work of curators in museums in Britain and the colonies, the historical display and interpretation of empire in Britain, and the establishment of ‘museum networks’ in the British imperial context. Curating empire sheds new light on the relationship between museums, as repositories for objects and cultural institutions for conveying knowledge, and the politics of culture and the formation of identities throughout the British Empire.
In a divided continent, women of colour come together to make a Black Europe visible.
Displayed on European stages from 1810 to 1815 as the Hottentot Venus, Sara Baartman was one of the most famous women of her day, and also one of the least known. As the Hottentot Venus, she was seen by Westerners as alluring and primitive, a reflection of their fears and suppressed desires. But who was Sara Baartman? Who was the woman who became the Hottentot Venus? Based on research and interviews that span three continents, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus tells the entwined histories of an elusive life and a famous icon. In doing so, the book raises questions about the possibilities and limits of biography for understanding those who live between and among different cultures. In rec...
Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. She argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a patchwork of medieval kingdoms and mode...
"Information technology shapes nearly every part of modern life, and debates about information--its meaning, effects, and applications--are central to a range of fields, from economics, technology, and politics to library science, media studies, and cultural studies. This rich, unique resource traces the history of information with an approach designed to draw connections across fields and perspectives, and provide essential context for our current age of information. Clear, accessible, and authoritative, the book opens with a series of articles that provide a narrative history of information from premodern practices to twenty-first-century information culture. This section focuses on major ...
In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the...