The Rejection of Continental Drift

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Oreskes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Continental Drift ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Standards Of Practice ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Fact ◽  
Basic Standards ◽  
Scientific Ideas

In the early twentieth century, American earth scientists were united in their opposition to the new--and highly radical--notion of continental drift, even going so far as to label the theory "unscientific." Some fifty years later, however, continental drift was heralded as a major scientific breakthrough and today it is accepted as scientific fact. Why did American geologists reject so adamantly an idea that is now considered a cornerstone of the discipline? And why were their European colleagues receptive to it so much earlier? This book, based on extensive archival research on three continents, provides important new answers while giving the first detailed account of the American geological community in the first half of the century. Challenging previous historical work on this episode, Naomi Oreskes shows that continental drift was not rejected for the lack of a causal mechanism, but because it seemed to conflict with the basic standards of practice in American geology. This account provides a compelling look at how scientific ideas are made and unmade.

The Obligation to Choose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Light Quanta ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wave Particle Duality ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, the Introduction sets out the approach adopted across this study as a whole as one which will combine, but also distinguish between, the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. Rejecting the previous critical focus on 1919 in studies of Albert Einstein’s cultural impact in favour of 1905, it argues for a more precise engagement with the scientific ideas, as well as a clearer acknowledgement of similar ideas across a broader range of disciplines in the early twentieth century. It also highlights Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as particularly apt literary figures for such a study, given their complicated individual relationships with the science of their day, relationships which combine a dislike of science in general with more positive responses to the new physics.

Rooted in Place, Constructed in Movement

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-53
Author(s):  
Sonia Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Nuevo Leon ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Since the turn of the twentieth century, men and women from the greater Mexican borderlands have shared labor concerns, engaged in labor solidarities, and employed activist strategies to improve their livelihoods. Based on findings from archival research in Mexico City, Washington, DC; Texas; Tamaulipas; and Nuevo León and by engaging in transnational methodological and historiographical approaches, this article takes two distinct but related cases of labor solidarities from the early twentieth century to reveal the class and gendered complexities of transnational labor solidarities. The cases of Gregorio Cortez, a Mexican farmer and immigrant from Tamaulipas living and working in Texas in 1901, and Caritina Piña, a Tamaulipas-born woman engaged in anarcho-syndicalism in the 1920s, reveal the potential of cross-class and gendered solidarities and underscore how a variety of social contexts informed and shaped labor movements. Excavating solidarities from a transnational perspective while exposing important limitations of the labor movement sheds light on the gendered, racial, and class complexities of such forms of shared struggle; but, equally important, reminds us of how much one can learn about the power of larger, global labor movements by closely examining the experiences of those residing on nations’ edges.

The female quest for the Celtic tongues of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales

2020 ◽  
pp. 305-318
Author(s):  
Bernhard Maier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Language Activism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Celtic Studies

This chapter highlights the female contribution to Celtic studies. It begins by expounding the context of the discipline in relation to nineteenth-century nationalism, surveying the predominantly male contributions during its formative period from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. It then examines the four main fields in which female scholars have made significant contributions, namely the collection of oral material, the publication of editions and translations, language activism including the production of grammars and textbooks, and linguistic studies of modern dialects and historical texts. The chapter concludes by discussing the social, political, religious, and educational reasons both for the comparatively small percentage of female scholars within the Celtic-speaking countries in general and for their comparatively high percentage in Irish studies. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which archival research might improve our understanding and appreciation of the female contribution to Celtic studies.

The Haunting of Mary Hutchinson

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-96
Author(s):  
Jane Garrity
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This chapter argues that earlier assessments of Mary Hutchinson’s writing have tended to conflate her status as a feminine arbiter of taste with her work, seeing the two as similarly irrational and slight. Such assessments have contributed to the pervasive assumption that Hutchinson is not a writer of substance and they have been instrumental in facilitating her obscurity and associating her work with a conservative concept of femininity. Instead, this chapter situates Hutchinson’s writing in relation to the Bloomsbury group’s interest in art and argues that her complex articulation of early twentieth-century femininity in Fugitive Pieces (1927) has been unjustly trivialized because of its association with the realm of fashion. Drawing from extensive archival research, this chapter shows how Hutchinson repeatedly puts femininity and modernity into conversation as she interrogates what it would mean if feminine phenomena were given a central place in our cultural analysis of modernity.

scholarly journals Rethinking Science, Religion and Nature in Environmental History: Drought in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealand

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Beattie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Opportunities ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Settler Society ◽  
Scientific Ideas

This article investigates popular and elite conceptions of science and religion in an early twentieth-century European settler society. It uses the case-study of rainmaking experiments and prayers in North Otago, New Zealand, in 1907, to challenge two dominant paradigms about New Zealand society: first, that scientific rationalism was automatically antipathetic to religion and, second, that by the early twentieth century scientific ideas were secularizing New Zealand society. North Otago's residents viewed prayer and experiment as complementary activities designed to meet the same ends; there was no distinctive, hermetically sealed division between the secular and the profane. Rainmaking also offers a fascinating way of exploring contested notions of science. While local residents enthusiastically embraced the use of explosives to bring rain, meteorologists decried these measures as unscientific and amateurish, thereby attempting to increase the legitimacy of their own profession. The reaction to North Otago's rainmaking prayers and experiments differed considerably from that of other societies such as in England and Australia in which similar prayers and experiments were undertaken. These differences reflected the special social and cultural characteristics of each country and, in New Zealand's case, its greater religious tolerance and social opportunities.

The Eugenesis of Beauty

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvaro Jarrín
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Plastic Surgery ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Female Beauty ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Racial Mixture ◽  
Eugenics Movement

This chapter, which is based on archival research, demonstrates that beauty developed as a central concern for the Brazilian eugenics movement in the early twentieth century as it became associated with improved hygienic practices and ongoing racial mixture, which eugenicists believed would inevitably whiten the nation as whole. The beauty of women—as the imagined bearers of future generations and as the objects of (male) medical scrutiny—was of particular concern. In other words, female beauty came to be understood as a symbol of the nation's progress, and beautification practices such as plastic surgery were lauded as sensible hygienic practices that aided the work of miscegenation.

Sight Readings: Photographers and American Jazz, 1900-1960

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan John Ainsworth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

This book explores the work of a wide range of American photographers attracted to jazz during the period 1900–60. It includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject, its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did. While some of these photographers are widely recognized for their work, many African American photojournalists, studio photographers, early twentieth-century émigrés, the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory backed up by extensive archival research, this book allows the reader to explore and understand twentieth-century jazz photography in both an engaging and comprehensive fashion.

South Caucasus from 1918 to 1921: history and historical parallels with the contemporary era

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 910-927 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Mkhoyan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
The South ◽  
South Caucasus ◽  
Regional Powers ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

The republics that make up the South Caucasus today gained brief independence after the fall of the Tsarist Empire, before the integration of the region into Bolshevik Russia. This period, even though short, gives interesting historical background to understand the present. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to study the South Caucasian republics from 1918 to 1921 at the regional and international levels, paying particular attention to the historical continuities with the contemporary era (since 1991). The results of the study show three main parallels between the early twentieth century (1918–1921) and the present. First, the region is still internally divided (e.g. the unresolved conflicts). Second, externally, it is torn between sometimes opposing powers (e.g. Russia and the Western powers). Finally, third, the partnerships with international or regional powers still remain asymmetrical; consequently, the need to cooperate with Russia exceeds the aspirations of the Western powers toward the South Caucasus. Based on archival research, this study contributes to the historiography of the region and gives a framework for understanding the South Caucasus in contemporary international relations.

scholarly journals Rethinking Science, Religion and Nature in Environmental History: Drought in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealand

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Beattie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Opportunities ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Settler Society ◽  
Scientific Ideas

This article investigates popular and elite conceptions of science and religion in an early twentieth-century European settler society. It uses the case-study of rainmaking experiments and prayers in North Otago, New Zealand, in 1907, to challenge two dominant paradigms about New Zealand society: first, that scientific rationalism was automatically antipathetic to religion and, second, that by the early twentieth century scientific ideas were secularizing New Zealand society. North Otago's residents viewed prayer and experiment as complementary activities designed to meet the same ends; there was no distinctive, hermetically sealed division between the secular and the profane. Rainmaking also offers a fascinating way of exploring contested notions of science. While local residents enthusiastically embraced the use of explosives to bring rain, meteorologists decried these measures as unscientific and amateurish, thereby attempting to increase the legitimacy of their own profession. The reaction to North Otago's rainmaking prayers and experiments differed considerably from that of other societies such as in England and Australia in which similar prayers and experiments were undertaken. These differences reflected the special social and cultural characteristics of each country and, in New Zealand's case, its greater religious tolerance and social opportunities.

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