Darwin Correspondence Project (review)

2008 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 426-428
Author(s):  
Jim Endersby
Keyword(s):  
Correspondence Project ◽  
Darwin Correspondence Project

Evolutionary Writings

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Darwin
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Global Impact ◽  
The World ◽  
Correspondence Project ◽  
Darwin Correspondence Project ◽  
Descent Of Man ◽  
Controversial Nature ◽  
Beagle Voyage

‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’ On topics ranging from intelligent design and climate change to the politics of gender and race, the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin occupy a pivotal position in contemporary public debate. This volume brings together the key chapters of his most important and accessible books, including the Journal of Researches on the Beagle voyage (1845), the Origin of Species (1871), and the Descent of Man, along with the full text of his delightful autobiography. They are accompanied by generous selections of responses from Darwin’s nineteenth-century readers from across the world. More than anything, they give a keen sense of the controversial nature of Darwin’s ideas, and his position within Victorian debates about man’s place in nature. The wide-ranging introduction by James A. Secord, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, explores the global impact and origins of Darwin’s work and the reasons for its unparalleled significance today.

LITERARY HISTORIES OF THE NATURAL HISTORICAL BOOK

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-421
Author(s):  
Jonathan V. Farina
Keyword(s):  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Online Databases ◽  
History Of ◽  
Knowledge Of Evolution ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Correspondence Project ◽  
Darwin Correspondence Project

Inspired in part by the coincident bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of The Origin of Species in 2009, scholars have been hard at work these last ten years writing substantial histories of nineteenth-century natural history and geology. These histories include exceptional books by scholars trained primarily in literary studies: Cannon Schmitt's Darwin and the Memory of the Human (2009); Daniel Brown's The Poetry of Victorian Scientists (2013); and Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (2007). With a few notable exceptions, however, the books I was invited to review here are written mostly by historians of science. And yet they are no less literary for that. All are marked by a tacit, pragmatic adoption of actor-network theory; by the extraordinary resources of the Darwin Correspondence Project and online databases of British periodicals; and often, too, by glossy illustrations. Further, nearly all of these histories share a methodological investment in what we call the history of the book, including all the economics of publishing (formats, sizes, fonts, prices, print runs, reviews, sales, generic conventions) and a political and heuristic stake in popularization and the general reading public. While Darwin (and Lyell, Herschel, Hooker, Huxley, and Spencer) remain at the center of the discussion, the empirically-minded history-of-the-book approach and investment in everyday readers reconstructs and legitimates a robust popular science that was engaged with, but not subordinate to, and often more liberal than the elite science of the X Club, the Royal Society, and other exclusive institutions. With the help of museums, lectures, tour guides, and other natural scientific literature, everyday readers produced their own knowledge of evolution, stratigraphy, speciation, animal emotion, and the sex life of plants.

The evolution of a theory

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-136
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Good Position ◽  
Initial Development ◽  
New Era ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
University Library ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Correspondence Project ◽  
Darwin Correspondence Project ◽  
Effective Use

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin Voyaging . Volume 1 of a Biography. Jonathan Cape, London, 1995. Pp. xiii + 605, 86 illustrations and maps, £25. ISBN 0 224 04202 5 A new era has opened for biographers of Charles Darwin with the prospective availability of the whole of his extant correspondence, meticulously edited by the members of the Darwin Correspondence Project at the Cambridge University Library, set up in 1975 by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith. Nine volumes have been published so far, covering the years from 1821 to 1861, and the remaining 10,000 letters listed in A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin are planned to follow in future volumes at intervals of about 10 months. Janet Browne, as one of the original Assistant Editors of the Project, was in a good position to take advantage of the hitherto untapped evidence in many of Darwin’s personal and scientific letters, and has made very effective use of it in writing the first instalment of a biography that covers the initial development of his thinking about evolution in a much more satisfactory fashion than any of its predecessors.

Correspondence: Project and Institutional Grants

AAUP Bulletin ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Herbert McArthur
Keyword(s):  
Correspondence Project

scholarly journals The correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller: from nineteenth century paper to twenty first century data

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Gavan McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
First Century ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Digital Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Correspondence Project

This paper presents a case study that demonstrates how a long term research activity, with the intention to create a scholarly edition of scientific correspondence, can be liberated from its print paradigm strictures to join the twenty first century world of interconnected knowledge. The Von Mueller Correspondence Project has produced a corpus of over 15,600 digitally transcribed letters and related materials focused on the period 1840 to 1896. These are complemented by materials in a range of forms that refer to Mueller dating from 1814 to 1931. Mueller was a prolific correspondent and established links with hundreds of fellow botanists and biologists across the globe; most of these, and certainly the most notable, will be registered in the History of Science Society Isis Cumulative Bibliography as Authority Records with links to publications about them and is some cases publications by them. The long-term plan is to systemically interlink the Von Mueller Correspondence Project digital corpus and the Isis Cumulative Bibliography and develop the synergies that will drive digital humanities analysis and future scholarly endeavour. That is the vision but what is the reality? At what stage is the project now? How did it get this far? What steps remain? How does the story of this project help us better understand the imperatives of digital scholarship – its strengths and its challenges?

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