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This open access handbook aims to provide a definitive assessment of the historiography and the future of major themes and approaches within the history of the earth sciences, understood broadly. The volume is intended for a broad range of readers, including graduate students, other scholars, and scientists, both familiar with and new to the history of the earth and environmental sciences.
Essays in the collection reflect on various problems in the study of the history of the earth sciences emphasizing crosscutting themes (such as economics, technology, politics, gender, etc.) and featuring innovative ways of framing historiographic perspectives.
Since scholarship in the history of science is increasingly becoming entangled with environmental, economic and bureaucratic, political, gender, and other historical approaches, the volume as a whole emphasizes the breadth and diversity of scholarship on the earth and environmental sciences.
List of contents
Part I. Big themes in historiography of earth sciences.- Reflections on the historiography of the earth sciences.- Philosophy and Earth Sciences.- Premodern earth and environmental science.- Lyell and Darwin as geologists.- Catastrophism vs. Uniformitarianism.- Part II. Formations.- Oceans.- Ice and Ice Age.- Planets.- Earthquakes.- Rivers.- Frozen earth.- Part III. Institutions and Practices.- Collections/museums.- Expeditions/Fieldwork in Earth Sciences.- Capitalism and imperialism in Earth Science.- Mining.- Data and Visual culture of geology.- Part IV. Perspectives.- Postcolonial perspectives.- Indigenous knowledge and perspectives.- Earth Systems Science.- Internationalism and the Earth & Environmental Sciences.- Labor and Credit.- Metaphors of Cyclicity in Earth and Human History.- Part V. Geographies.- The Mediterranean.- Earth Sciences and Latin America.- Earth Sciences and Africa.- Mining in Imperial Russia.
About the author
Elena Aronova is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published on the history of environmental data collection, history of the International Geophysical Year, history of seismology, and the historiography of science. She is the author of Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2021), which documents the history of continuous efforts to integrate scientific knowledge and new technologies — from plant genetics to computers — into historical research. She has co-edited two collections of essays: Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond: Paradigms Defected (2016) and Data Histories ( 2017).
David Sepkoski is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in History of Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of many books and articles in the history of the earth and environmental sciences, including The Paleobiological Revolution: Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology (with Michael Ruse, University of Chicago Press 2009), Rereading the Fossil Record: The Rise of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (University of Chicago Press 2012), and Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press 2020). Among other awards, he is most recently the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 2019-2020.
Marco Tamborini teaches philosophy and history of science at the Technical University of Darmstadt. His research explores the dynamic intersections of the life sciences, engineering, and ethics, with a particular focus on bioinspired and emerging technoscientific fields. His recent book publications include The Architecture of Evolution: The Science of Form in Twentieth-Century Evolutionary Biology (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), Entgrenzung: Die Biologisierung der Technik und die Technisierung der Biologie (Meiner, 2022), and Biorobotik zur Einführung (Junius Verlag, 2024).
Summary
This open access handbook aims to provide a definitive assessment of the historiography and the future of major themes and approaches within the history of the earth sciences, understood broadly. The volume is intended for a broad range of readers, including graduate students, other scholars, and scientists, both familiar with and new to the history of the earth and environmental sciences.
Essays in the collection reflect on various problems in the study of the history of the earth sciences emphasizing crosscutting themes (such as economics, technology, politics, gender, etc.) and featuring innovative ways of framing historiographic perspectives.
Since scholarship in the history of science is increasingly becoming entangled with environmental, economic and bureaucratic, political, gender, and other historical approaches, the volume as a whole emphasizes the breadth and diversity of scholarship on the earth and environmental sciences.
