Museums At The Forefront Of The History And Philosophy Of Geology

Information on museum activities around the world.

Information on museum activities around the world.

This work is the critical edition of the catalog of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold’s II mineralogical collection. The volume, unpublished and preserved at the Historical Archives of the University of Firenze Museum System, dates to 1765 and describes 242 mineralogical specimens coming primarily from the current Slovak-Hungarian mining district. This edition gives the transcription of the German manuscript and its translation into English together with an organized system of notation to illustrate the complex history of the text, the characterization of the mineralogical species, and the geographical location of the mineral extraction sites. This work represents to date the only published catalog of a mineralogical collection belonging to a member of the Habsburg-Lorraine family.

In this anthology, top scholars researching libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) issues in Scandinavia explore pressing issues for contemporary LAMs. In recent decades, relations between libraries, archives, and museums have changed rapidly: collections have been digitized; books, documents, and objects have been mixed in new ways; and LAMs have picked up new tasks in response to external changes. Libraries now host makerspaces and literary workshops, archives fight climate change and support indigenous people, and museums are used as instruments for economic growth and urban planning. At first glance, the described changes may appear as a divergent development, where the LAMs are growing apart. However, this book demonstrates that the present transformation of LAMs is primarily a convergent development. Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Transition will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners seeking to get on top of the LAM literature or the particularities of Scandinavian LAMs.

"This volume samples the history of art about fossils-and the visual conceptualization of their significance-starting with biblical and mythological depictions, extending to renditions of ancient life in long-vanished habitats, and on to a modern understanding that paleoart conveys lessons for the betterment of the human condition. Twenty-nine chapters illustrate how art about fossils has come to be a significant teaching tool not only about evolution of past life, but also about conservation of our planet for the benefit of future generations"--

Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects – ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made – came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c. 1500–1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new essays on ‘encountering things’ to enrich the volume. These look at cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early modern world and the history of material culture.

Milwaukee in Stone and Clay follows directly in the footsteps of Raymond Wiggers's previous award-winning book, Chicago in Stone and Clay. It offers a wide-ranging look at the fascinating geology found in the building materials of Milwaukee County's architectural landmarks. And it reveals the intriguing and often surprising links between science, art, and engineering. Laid out in two main sections, the book first introduces the reader to the fundamentals of Milwaukee's geology and its amazing prehuman history, then provides a site-by-site tour guide. Written in an engaging, informal style, this work presents the first in-depth exploration of the interplay among the region's most architecturally significant sites, the materials they're made of, and the sediments and bedrock they're anchored in. Raymond Wiggers crafted Milwaukee in Stone and Clay as an informative and exciting overview of this city. His two decades of experience leading architectural-geology tours have demonstrated the popularity of this approach and the subject matter.

The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.