This copiously illustrated volume is the first systematic general work to do justice to the fruits of recent scholarship in the history of natural history. Public interest in this lively field has been stimulated by environmental concerns and through links with the histories of art, collecting and gardening. The centrality of the development of natural history for other branches of history - medical, colonial, gender, economic, ecological - is increasingly recognized. Twenty-four specially commissioned essays cover the period from the sixteenth century, when the first institutions of natural history were created, to its late nineteenth-century transformation by practitioners of the new biological sciences. An introduction discusses novel approaches that have made this a major focus for research in cultural history. The essays, which include suggestions for further reading, offer a coherent and accessible overview of a fascinating subject. An epilogue highlights the relevance of this wide-ranging survey for current debates on museum practice, the display of ecological diversity and concerns about the environment.

Explores the development of natural history since the Renaissance and contextualizes current discussions of biodiversity.

The relationship between science and civil society is essential to our understanding of cultural change during the Victorian era. Finnegan's study looks at the shifting nature of this process during the nineteenth century, using Scotland as the focus for his argument.

The book represents a selection of papers presented at an international symposium in Singapore on the role of theory and practice in the mutually interactive and mutating relations between institutions and cultures. In effect, the papers turn about a single theme: the ways in which power is expressed through those institutions by means of which cultures mediate their requirements. The symposium brought together scholars and academics from a variety of disciplines, including literature, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, comparative literature and comparative religions. In terms of the geography of cultures and the history of institutions, the range of reference to this book of the symposium is global: from Hong Kong awaiting 1997, through the travails of political democracy in Singapore, and Cultural Studies à la Greenblatt or under the aegis of Shakespeare as cultural idol, through German Romantic theory and its relevance to current theorizing about theory in America, to Zen Buddhism and Nagarjuna and how these two sources refract the concerns of Jung, Lacan and Derrida; through Colonialism and postcoloniality and how they have shaped identity and mediated power to the current crises in education created by these mediations, specifically, in literary studies. The aim of the symposium was twofold: to theorize about the impulse to theorize in relation to the plurality of cultures and institutions which comprises our contemporary world; and to ground this impulse in those specificities and contingencies which provide resistance to such theorizing.

How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations – much of it wrong. Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism has operated through the technologies of museum bureaucracy: the ledger book, the card catalogue, and eventually the database. As Indigenous communities reclaim what is theirs, this timely work shines a light on the importance of documentation for access to and return of cultural heritage.

Cultural History in Europe addresses the following questions: What is the current state of discussion in cultural history? Which European institutions engage exclusively in cultural history and which topics do they address? How will cultural history develop in the future? In addition, it provides a wide-ranging overview of contemporary developments in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Great Britain, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Spain.