[E&E seminars] MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History, Friday December 4, 2009

[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

 

Sponsored by MIT’s History Faculty and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. For more information or to be put on the mailing list, please contact Margo Collett at mcollett at mit.edu
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