[E&E seminars] MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History, FRIDAY, 12-4-09

[Margo Collett]

MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History



Thomas R. Dunlap

Texas A&M University

   “Art, Science, and Money: Field Guides to the Birds, 1889-2009”

 Field guides to the birds, which for more than a century have led people to nature and encouraged them to help save it, live at the intersection of outdoor recreation, conservation, science, commercial art, and publishing – physical objects that trace our changing knowledge and the values we attach to nature.  Their history began in the late nineteenth century with a generation of experiments with text, illustrations, and their arrangement.  It entered a new phase in 1934 when Roger Tory Peterson put birders’ accumulating knowledge of field identification into a new kind of guide that made birding a mass recreation.  Now birders can choose from a variety of general guides or find ones for every level from novice to expert, local birds to birds of the world.  The history of the guides traces the evolution of a hobby and complex and changing relations between amateurs and professional in bird study.

Friday, December 4, 2009

2:30 to 4:30 pm

Building E51 Room 095

Corner of Wadsworth and Amherst Streets, Cambridge

 
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