Terra Incognita (eBook)

Alain Corbin is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Acknowledgements


A comprehensive history implies the study of ignorance



Part I : Gaps In Enlightenment Knowledge Of The Earth


1. The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

2. The Age of the Earth?

3. Imagining the Earth's Internal Structure

4. The Mystery of the Poles

5. The Unfathomable Mysteries of the Deep Sea

6. Discovering Mountains

7. Mysterious Glaciers

8. A Fascination for Volcanos

9. The Birth of Meteorology

10. Conquering the Skies

11. The State of Scientific Ignorance at the End of the Age of Enlightenment



Part II : A Gradual Decline in Ignorance (1800-1850)

12. Understanding Glaciers

13. The Birth of Geology

14. Volcanoes and the Mystery of 'Dry Fogs'

15.The Ocean Depths and the Fear of the Unknown

16. Reading Clouds and the Beaufort Scale

17.The Poles Remain a Mystery

18. The State of Scientific Ignorance in the Early 1860s



Part III : Shrinking the Boundaries of Ignorance (1860-1900)

19. Exploring the Ocean Depths

20. The Development of Dynamic Meteorology

21. Manned Flight and the Discovery of the Troposphere and Stratosphere

22. Scientific Volcanology and the Birth of Seismology

23. Measuring the Grip of Ice

24. Solving the Mysteries of Rivers : Fluvialism, Hydrology and Speleology

25. A New Approach to Reading the Globe

26. Was There Open Sea at the Poles?

27. The Earth Sciences Slowly Filter into General Knowledge

28. Measuring Ignorance at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century



Notes

Index

'Alain Corbin is one of the most remarkable historians writing about anything anywhere. A master of innovation in his choice of subjects and approaches to history, Corbin here brilliantly tackles "ignorance" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what earlier generations did not know. This is a fascinating book, nicely translated.'
John Merriman, Yale University

'Original as always in his approach to history, Alain Corbin tells the story of the discovery of the earth from 1750 to 1900 by emphasizing earlier ignorance of lands, seas and space. Written in the author's usual lucid and accessible style, the book will appeal to general readers as well as scholars and students of history.'
Peter Burke, University of Cambridge

'Fascinating'
Shepherd Express