Darwin's narrative of the earthquake at Concepción, set within the frameworks of Lyellian uniformitarianism, romantic aesthetics, and the emergence of geology as a popular science, is suggestive of the role of the sublime in geological enquiry and theory in the early nineteenth century. Darwin's Beagle diary and later notebooks and publications show that the aesthetic of the sublime was both a form of representing geology to a popular audience, and a crucial structure for the observation and recording of the event from the beginning. The awesome spectacle of the earthquake proved in turn the magnitude of the forces at stake in earth history, and helped to make geology an epic conjoining the history of civilization with the history of the earth.

This paper examines the earthquake monitoring and prediction program, called “collective monitoring, collective defense,” in communist China during the Cultural Revolution, a period of political upheavals and natural disasters. Guided by their scientific and political ideas, the Chinese developed approaches to earthquake monitoring and prediction that emphasized mass participation, everyday knowledge, and observations of macro-seismic phenomena. The paper explains the ideas, practices, and epistemology of the program within the political context of the Cultural Revolution. It also suggests possibilities for comparative analysis of science, state, and natural disasters. The paper redefines the concept of “citizen science” and argues that the concept provides a useful comparative perspective on the intimate relationship between science and the macropolitics of modern state and society.

Hijōji (emergency) was an important keyword in the militarist Japan of the 1930s. Previous scholarship has assumed that such language sprung from the global financial crisis of 1929, and subsequent diplomatic events. Our article demonstrates, however, that a full-bodied language of emergency was crafted well before the collapse of the global economy, and against the backdrop of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which destroyed the Japanese capital. While previous “great earthquakes” had been opportunities to strengthen Japanese participation in the global project of science, this one led more dramatically to a crisis of reason, and indirectly contributed to the spiritual, anti-western, and anti-rational rhetoric of what became the “Showa Restoration.” This and other post-disaster landscapes, we argue, should be examined as compelling sites for the crafting of political language – sites of opportunity and meaning as well as trial. While the phrase “state of emergency” was coined under very different circumstances in post-war Britain, it gained power and charisma in Japan, and likely other places around the world, by its association with natural catastrophe. Thus did modern politics establish a new connection with the traditional realm of the sublime, and in the case of Japan, the supernatural. Emergency's ability to associate politics with nature would never disappear, and has perhaps even strengthened in the early twenty-first century.

Between 1878 and 1880, Switzerland, Italy, and Japan initiated the world's first national earthquake commissions, but only the Swiss made ordinary citizens a vital part of this undertaking. This paper examines the texture of communication between Swiss scientists and lay observers and traces the development of a language for seismology that was simultaneously scientific and vernacular. This is the story of an aborted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk, an alternative abandoned on the way to the increasingly technical science of the twentieth century.

For historians of science, earthquakes may well have an air of the exotic. Often terrifying, apparently unpredictable, and arguably even more deadly today than in a pre-industrial age, they are not a phenomenon against which scientific progress is easy to gauge. Yet precisely because seismic forces seem so uncanny, even demonic, naturalizing them has been one of the most tantalizing and enduring challenges of modern science. Earthquakes have repeatedly shaken not just human edifices but the foundations of human knowledge. They have been known to cast doubt on divine providence, on the predictive ability of the sciences, and on the capacity of the human mind to learn from an experience of sheer terror. Most recently, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 have forced nuclear experts around the world to confront the limits of their knowledge and the vulnerability of their best-laid plans.

This paper throws light on the development of experimental zoology in Britain by focusing on the establishment of the British Journal of Experimental Biology (BJEB) and the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) in 1923. The key actors in this story were Lancelot T. Hogben, Julian S. Huxley and Francis A.E. Crew, who started exploring the possibility of establishing an experimentally oriented zoological journal in 1922. In order to support the BJEB and further the cause of the experimental approach, Hogben, Crew, Huxley and their colleagues decided to found a society, which led to the formation of the SEB. From its inception the journal was plagued with difficulties that led to the merger of the BJEB and the Biological Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in the autumn of 1925. Also discussed are the views that the leading proponents of experimental zoology in Britain in the 1920s expressed towards morphology and how their views further complicate the already much modified ‘revolt from morphology’ thesis.

During its centennial celebrations in 2008, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at the University of California, Berkeley paid homage to its founding director, Joseph Grinnell. Recognized as a leading scientific institution, the MVZ managed to grow throughout the twentieth century, a period often characterized by the decline of natural history. To understand how and why research flourished at the MVZ, this paper looks closely at Grinnell's undergraduate course, the Natural History of the Vertebrates (NHV). Taught by MVZ affiliates since 1914, the NHV offers an important window on Grinnell's approach and legacy. This paper argues that the NHV contributed to the MVZ's long-term success by acting as, first, a gateway to natural history; second, a vector for the MVZ's research programme; and third, a shared faculty responsibility. Grinnell's significance in the history of science is understated, in part because his writing style de-emphasized the importance of his theoretical contributions, including his development of the niche concept, his emphasis on population thinking and geographic isolation in studies of evolution, and his effort to integrate speciation questions and genetics. Studying the NHV highlights these contributions because Grinnell freely communicated his ideas to his students. An analysis of Grinnell's course material shows that his theoretical and methodological approach pre-dated the evolutionary synthesis and inspired natural-history research throughout the past century.