The European Journals Of William Maclure

William Maclure (1763-1840) was an Amer. geologist & philanthropist who traveled extensively in Europe during the early years of the 19th century, conducting geological surveys & collecting rock & mineral specimens for schools & scientific institutions in the U.S. He has been called "the Father of Modern Geology" for the extraordinary feat of having made a one-man geological survey of the eastern U.S. from Maine to Georgia, & from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. Maclure used his wealth to support such institutions as the Acad. of Natural Sciences of Phila. & to subsidize the work of a number of scientists & teachers. He was also concerned with the reform of education & set up libraries & schools for children of the lower classes. Scholars have questioned why Maclure retired early to devote the rest of his life to science & reform. Some answers may be found in this vol., which includes transcriptions from microfilm of some 20 journals which Maclure kept during his travels & research in Europe; they span the years 1805-15 & 1820-25. Illus.

Maclure of New Harmony follows the twists and turns of William Maclure's intriguing life. A native Scotsman, Maclure (1763--1840) became a merchant, made a fortune, and retired in his early thirties. Then his life became interesting. Fascinated by the study of geology, Maclure did fieldwork throughout Europe before traveling to the United States, where he completed the first geological survey of his adopted nation and published a detailed, color geological map -- one reason he is known as the Father of American Geology. Maclure's travels sharpened his convictions about social justice and led him to a life of social radicalism. He founded progressive schools to educate the children of the working classes and, in 1820, he joined forces with Robert Owen to found New Harmony -- the utopian community in Indiana. Ever restless, Maclure later moved to Mexico, where he watched his hopes for the new republic founder.

Volume Twenty-Five of Perspectives on the History of Higher Education, the silver anniversary edition, offers three fresh contributions to the understanding of American higher education in the nineteenth century and three historical perspectives on topics of contemporary concern.The divergent paths of antebellum colleges in the North and South have long been recognized. Stephen Tomlinson and Kevin Windham discuss Alva Woods, who moved from Calvinist New England to preside over the new University of Alabama. Woods personified the commitment to evangelical Protestantism and rigid student discipline that prevailed in northern colleges of that era, but in Tuscaloosa confronted the sons of planters, raised to respect mainly independence, power, and the Southern code of honor. Adam Nelson considers geology, a crucially important science in early America that existed on the periphery of higher education but eventually exerted pressure for intellectual modernization. He portrays the small community of scientific pioneers who sought the latest scientific knowledge from Europe, surveyed the mineral wealth of American states, and advocated for science in the college curriculum.Beginning in the 1930s, the National Research Council waged an organized campaign to encourage academic patenting and centralize it within one organization. Jane Robbins explains the crosscurrents of interests that plagued and eventually scuttled that effort, but that set the stage for the contemporary practice of university patenting. Robert Hampel examines how, for more than four decades, students at Yale University took a major responsibility for learning into their own hands by publishing a Critique of courses. He analyzes these documents to determine if their aims were to identify easy or challenging offerings, and finds that this effort produced highly responsible articles. A review essay by Doris Malkmus sheds new light on the experience of co-eds in

A close examination of an iconic small town that gives boundless insights into architecture, landscape, preservation, and philanthropy Avant-Garde in the Cornfields is an in-depth study of New Harmony, Indiana, a unique town in the American Midwest renowned as the site of two successive Utopian settlements during the nineteenth century: the Harmonists and the Owenites. During the Cold War years of the twentieth century, New Harmony became a spiritual “living community” and attracted a wide variety of creative artists and architects who left behind landmarks that are now world famous. This engrossing and well-documented book explores the architecture, topography, and preservation of New Harmony during both periods and addresses troubling questions about the origin, production, and meaning of the town’s modern structures, landscapes, and gardens. It analyzes how these were preserved, recognizing the funding that has made New Harmony so vital, and details the elaborate ways in which the town remains an ongoing experiment in defining the role of patronage in historic preservation. An important reappraisal of postwar American architecture from a rural perspective, Avant-Garde in the Cornfields presents provocative ideas about how history is interpreted through design and historic preservation—and about how the extraordinary past and present of New Harmony continue to thrive today. Contributors: William R. Crout, Harvard U; Stephen Fox, Rice U; Christine Gorby, Pennsylvania State U; Cammie McAtee, Harvard U; Nancy Mangum McCaslin; Kenneth A. Schuette Jr., Purdue U; Ralph Schwarz; Paul Tillich.

The years between 1775 and 1815 constitute a crucial episode in the evolutionary history of Europe and America. Between the start of the American Revolution, with the first armed clashes between British regulars and American militiamen at Concord and Lexington, and the closing act of the French Revolution, with the eclipse of Napoleon's dreams of pan-European glory on the battlefield of Waterloo, America and Europe witnessed the rise and fall of radicalism, which left virtually no aspect of public and private life untouched. While the American colonies managed to wrench themselves away from their colonial parent, and while France careered down the stormy rapids of its own Revolution, Great Britain went through the turbulent process of redefining itself vis-à-vis both these emerging nations, and the world at large. But the period 1775 to 1815 offers more than the two ideological Revolutions that determined the face of modern America and Europe: feeding into and emanating from these Revolutions there were major watersheds in virtually all areas of cultural, intellectual and political life - varying from the rise of Romanticism to the birth of abolitionism, and from the beginnings of modern feminism to the creation of modern nationhood and its enduring cultural stereotypes. In this collection of interdisciplinary essays, historians and literary critics from both sides of the Atlantic analyze a broad spectrum of the watersheds and faultlines that arose in this formative era of Euro-American relations. Individually, the essays trace one or more of the transatlantic patterns of intellectual, cultural or scientific cross-pollination between the Old and the New World, between pre- and post-Revolutionary modes and mores. Collectively, the essays argue that the many revolutions that produced the national ideologies, identities and ideas of state of present-day America and Europe did not merely play a role in national debates, but that they very much belonged to an intricate network of transnational and, more particularly, transatlantic dialogues.

A vibrant, diverse history of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples in the age of Romanticism Vesuvius is best known for its disastrous eruption of 79CE. But only after 1738, in the age of Enlightenment, did the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii reveal its full extent. In an era of groundbreaking scientific endeavour and violent revolution, Vesuvius became a focal point of strong emotions and political aspirations, an object of geological enquiry, and a powerful symbol of the Romantic obsession with nature. John Brewer charts the changing seismic and social dynamics of the mountain, and the meanings attached by travellers to their sublime confrontation with nature. The pyrotechnics of revolution and global warfare made volcanic activity the perfect political metaphor, fuelling revolutionary enthusiasm and conservative trepidation. From Swiss mercenaries to English entrepreneurs, French geologists to local Neapolitan guides, German painters to Scottish doctors, Vesuvius bubbled and seethed not just with lava, but with people whose passions, interests, and aims were as disparate as their origins.

The discovery of dinosaurs and other large extinct saurians - a term under which the Victorians commonly lumped ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and their kin - makes exciting reading and has caught the attention of palaeontologists, historians of science and the general public alike. The papers in this collection go beyond the familiar tales about famous fossil hunters and focus on relatively little-known episodes in the discovery and interpretation (from both a scientific and an artistic point of view) of dinosaurs and other inhabitants of the Mesozoic world. They cover a long time span, from the beginnings of modern scientific palaeontology in the 1700s to the present, and deal with many parts of the world, from the Yorkshire coast to Central India, from Bavaria to the Sahara. The characters in these stories include professional palaeontologists and geologists (some of them well-known, others quite obscure), explorers, amateur fossil collectors, and artists, linked together by their interest in Mesozoic creatures.