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Peoples on Parade
Examines the phenomenon of human exhibitions in nineteenth-century Britain and considers how this legacy informs understandings of race and empire today.
Vanished
Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90 percent of species that ever lived are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction? Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to piece together that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth. Extinction went from being viewed as theologically dangerous to pervasive, even natural. Yet Europeans and Americans quickly used the idea that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion. Weaving together pioneering original research and breath-taking narrative storytelling, Vanished explores the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire.
Time Travelers
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.
Catastrophic Thinking
A history of scientific ideas about extinction that explains why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to “think catastrophically” about extinction. We live in an age in which we are repeatedly reminded—by scientists, by the media, by popular culture—of the looming threat of mass extinction. We’re told that human activity is currently producing a sixth mass extinction, perhaps of even greater magnitude than the five previous geological catastrophes that drastically altered life on Earth. Indeed, there is a very real concern that the human species may itself be poised to go the way of the dinosaurs, victims of the most recent mass extinc...
Curating Empire
Curating empire explores the diverse roles played by museums and their curators in moulding and representing the British imperial experience. The establishment of museums throughout the British Empire is increasingly recognised as part of the context of imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both practically and symbolically. Focusing on a range of curators and museums, this collection demonstrates how individuals, their curatorial practices, and intellectual and political agendas influenced the direction of their institutions, the interpretation of material, and the experiences of audiences in a variety of museums across the globe. Taken together, these contributions suggest...
Evolution and Victorian Culture
These essays examine the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences.
To Exist is to Resist
In a divided continent, women of colour come together to make a Black Europe visible.
Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus
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...
From Plunder to Preservation
This book looks at the effect of the British Empire on the cultures and civilisations of the peoples it ruled by considering the impact of empire on the idea of 'heritage'. Case studies and illustrations show how our understanding of the diverse heritages of world history was forged in the crucible of the British Empire.
The Last Blank Spaces
The challenge of opening Africa and Australia to British imperial influence fell to a coterie of proto-professional explorers who sought knowledge, adventure, and fame but often experienced confusion, fear, and failure. The Last Blank Spaces follows the arc of these explorations, from idea to practice, intention to outcome, myth to reality.
