Handbook of the Historiography of the Earth and Environmental Sciences

This handbook aims to provide a definitive assessment of the historiography and the future of major themes and approaches within the history of the earth sciences, understood broadly. The volume is intended for a broad range of readers, including graduate students, other scholars, and scientists, both familiar with and new to the history of the earth and environmental sciences.

Essays in the collection reflect on various problems in the study of the history of the earth sciences emphasizing crosscutting themes (such as economics, technology, politics, gender, etc.) and featuring innovative ways of framing historiographic perspectives.

Since scholarship in the history of science is increasingly becoming entangled with environmental, economic and bureaucratic, political, gender, and other historical approaches, the volume as a whole emphasizes the breadth and diversity of scholarship on the earth and environmental sciences.

Part I. Big themes in historiography of earth sciences
- Reflections on the historiography of the earth sciences
- Philosophy and Earth Sciences
- Premodern earth and environmental science
- Lyell and Darwin as geologists
- Catastrophism vs. Uniformitarianism

Part II. Formations
- Oceans
- Ice and Ice Age
- Planets
- Earthquakes
- Rivers
- Frozen earth

Part III. Institutions and Practices
- Collections/museums
- Expeditions/Fieldwork in Earth Sciences
- Capitalism and imperialism in Earth Science
- Mining
- Data and Visual culture of geology

Part IV. Perspectives
- Postcolonial perspectives
- Indigenous knowledge and perspectives
- Earth Systems Science
- Internationalism and the Earth & Environmental Sciences
- Labor and Credit
- Metaphors of Cyclicity in Earth and Human History

Part V. Geographies
- The Mediterranean
- Earth Sciences and Latin America
- Earth Sciences and Africa
- Mining in Imperial Russia