|9780822967477|Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru|The Matter of Empire examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the material exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Centered on Potosi, Bolivia, Orlando Bentancor’s original study ties the colonizers’ attempts to justify the abuses wrought upon the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire’s rightful place in the global sphere. Bentancor points to the underlying principles of Scholasticism, particularly in the work off Thomas Aquinas, as the basis of the instrumentalist conception of matter…

|9780822948278|Documenting Science in Prussia, 1770-1850|Over the past two decades, natural things—especially those collected, exchanged, studied, and displayed in museums, such as animals, plants, minerals, and rocks—have emerged as fascinating protagonists for historical research. Nature on Paper follows a different, humbler set of objects that make it possible to trace the global routes and shifting meanings of those natural things: the catalogs, inventories, and other paper tools of information management that form the backbone of collection institutions. Anne Greenwood MacKinney focuses on Prussia from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, a place and time that witnessed the dramatic restructuring of research,…

|9780822948285|Evolution and Religion in Global Popular Media|In a globalized and networked world, where media crosses national borders, contributors reveal how transnational processes have shaped popular representations of scientific and religious ideas in the United Kingdom, Argentina, Ecuador, India, Spain, Turkey, Israel, and Japan. Most Adaptable to Change demonstrates the varied and divergent ways evolutionary ideas and nonscientific traditions and ways of understanding life on Earth have transformed across the globe. By examining a range of popular media forms across a multitude of different geopolitical contexts from the 1920s to today, this book traces how different evolutionary traditions and figures have…

|9780822948292|Victorian Polymath| William Whewell, the famous master of Trinity College in Cambridge, was a central figure in nineteenth-century British scientific culture and one of the last great polymaths. His influential work ranged from history and philosophy of science, education, architecture, mineralogy, and political economy to mathematics, engineering, natural theology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. Among his many gifts to science was his role as cofounder and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and his wordsmithing; he coined the terms scientist, physicist, linguistics, and electrode. While he was himself an opponent of evolution through natural selection, Whewell’s most…

|9780822948308|Technology, Mediation, and Human-Animal Relationships|Human and animal lives intersect, whether through direct physical contact or by inhabiting the same space at a different time. Environmental humanities scholars have begun investigating these relationships through the emerging field of multispecies studies, building on decades of work in animal history, feminist studies, and Indigenous epistemologies. Contributors to this volume consider the entangled human-animal relationships of a complex multispecies world, where domesticated animals, wild animals, and people cross paths, creating hybrid naturecultures. Technology, they argue, structures how animals and humans share spaces. From clothing to cars to computers, technology acts as a mediator and…