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 [email protected]

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