Ever wonder how people figured out there used to be such things as dinosaurs? Curious about how scientists learned to reconstruct fossil skeletons? The knowledge we take for granted today was slow in coming, and along the way, scientists and scholars had some weird ideas. This Web site shows some of their mistakes, provides a timeline of events, gives biographies of a few of the people who have gotten us where we are today, and lists resources you can use to learn more.
Perseus is an evolving digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and language. Our primary goal is to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible. We anticipate that greater accessibility to the sources for the study of the humanities will strengthen the quality of questions, lead to new avenues of research, and connect more people through the connection of ideas.
ILEJ, the "Internet Library of Early Journals" was a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford, conducted under the auspices of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme. It aimed to digitise substantial runs of 18th and 19th century journals, and make these images available on the Internet, together with their associated bibliographic data. The project finished in 1999, and no additional material will be added. See Final Report for conclusions of the project.
The core collection for the project are runs of at least 20 consecutive years of:
Three 18th-century journals Three 19th-century journals
Gentleman's Magazine
The Annual Register
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
Notes and Queries
The Builder
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
This full text library of early journals includes all of the articles printed in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (United Kingdom National Academy of Science) from 1757 to 1777. Researchers will find here articles on the history of biology, technology, physics, electicity, botany, zoology, chemistry, medicine, anatomy, astronomy, and other scientific subjects. Also included are full text versions of "The Builder" (1843-52) a British journal for engineers and archictes. All pages are electronically stored as PDF files and thus are not individually searchable. Searches can be done by author, title or subject for various articles in the database. Other full text journals here include the Annual Register (which often includes a section on Natural History), Blackwell's, Gentleman's Magazine, and Notes and Queries.
Queen Elizabeth I of England ascended to the throne in 1558. The last women of sole political power had been a Greek Egyptian Pharaoh named Cleopatra in the mid-1st century B.C. She reemerged in the 16th century as Elizabeth I. Her century is marked by the break away of Protestant churches from the authority of the Pope, whose Catholic authority had been instituted by the sword of the French King, Charlemagne, in the 8th century. Elizabeth was raised during intense religious strife between the Catholics and Protestants. She began her reign with rejections of marriage alliances with Spain, France and English nobles to rule as the Virgin Queen. As Queen she managed to pass a unification act that created a single Church of England that excluded papal authority. Elizabeth, however, seemed to be more enchanted with the arts encouraging the works of Shakespeare.
In retrospect, the sixth decade of the nineteenth century was truly remarkable with respect to the development of the science of biology. By the end of those ten years all of the pieces were in place for the maturation of what had been a purely observational discipline into one with a strong theoretical basis. The key elements of what would become modern biology had been discovered and formulated. However, it took more than eighty years to bring all of them together (1). The result, the field of molecular biology and its attendant sub-disciplines, is grounded philosophically in a mechanistic, deterministic and reductionist view that derives from the logical empiricist setting in which it was born and which has not changed, despite the radical shift that has come about in the physical sciences.
Welcome to the H-Environment web site, a gateway to information concerning past human interactions with nature. Part of H-NET, the Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine initiative, H-Environment is supported by organizations of professional historians.
The aim of this page is to bring together people from all over the world who are interested in the archives of science, technology and medicine. STAMA International (a sub group of the International Council on Archives) and STAMA Australia (a special interest group of the Australian Society of Archivists) are currently the key participants in this community. The key communication tool for the community is the STAMA Email List.
