This paper is about collecting, travel and the geographies of science. At one level it examines the circumstances that led to Isaac Lea's description in Philadelphia of six freshwater mussel shells of the family Unionidae, originally collected by John Kirk during David Livingstone's Zambesi Expedition, 1858–64. At another level it is about how travel is necessary in the making of scientific knowledge. Following these shells from south-eastern Africa to Philadelphia via London elucidates the journeys necessary for Kirk and Lea's scientific work to progress and illustrates that the production of what was held to be malacological knowledge occurred through collaborative endeavours that required the travel of the specimens themselves. Intermediaries in London acted to link the expedition, Kirk's efforts and Lea's classification across three continents and to facilitate the novel description of six species of freshwater mussel. The paper demonstrates the role of travel in the making of mid-nineteenth-century natural history and in developing the relationships and credibility necessary to perform the research on which classifications undertaken elsewhere were based.

A surge of spatial imagery is sweeping across wide stretches of the academy. Spheres of scholarly endeavour hitherto seemingly immune to matters of space and place have been exploiting the geographical lexicon and appending to it ever more imaginative adjectives. Thus literary critics, cultural historians, psychologists, poets and many others have been uncovering geographies that are variously depicted as ‘tender’, ‘neural’, ‘fabulous’, ‘romantic’ and ‘distracted’. Geographers too have added to this adjectival efflorescence with their staging of ‘hybrid’, ‘malevolent’, ‘phobic’ and ‘sensuous’ geographies – to name but a very few. The analytic power of geographical readings has thus been felt across a broad terrain. Thomas Kaufmann, for instance, has recently developed a ‘historical geography of art’ – or what he calls a ‘geohistory of art’ – in which he mobilizes geographical motifs to explore artistic identity, diffusion, circulation and transculturation. Steven Harris, Peter Burke and many others now routinely speak of the ‘geography of knowledge’. And in her recent account of nineteenth-century American expansionism along the western frontier, Amy DeRogatis has found inspiration in the idea of ‘moral geography’ to throw light on the means by which New England ways of life were transferred to the Western Reserve.

John Canaday,The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+310. ISBN 0-299-16854-9. £19.50.

Septimus H. Paul,Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations 1941–1952. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Pp. ix+266. ISBN 0-8142-0852-5. £31.95.

Peter Bacon Hales,Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-252-02296-3. £22.00.

A decade after the end of the Cold War, the culture and technology of nuclear weapons had lost much of the overt sense of dread they once inspired. The decline in international tension following the end of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc produced a massive shift in the ideology of the nuclear in the 1990s. The de-targeting and dismantling of large numbers of nuclear weapons and the demise of the threat of nuclear annihilation created new conditions both for international security and for the writing of nuclear history. With the declassification and release of large quantities of official documentation from the former adversaries, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1995, a burst of histories of various aspects of the nuclear age have appeared over the last ten years, exploring not just the technopolitics, strategy and operational logistics of the Cold War and the arms race, but the cultural history of the nuclear age, its imagery, its architecture, its oppositional politics and its effects on the landscape, national and regional economies and cultures and indeed everyday life. At a time of global economic and political uncertainty and the emergent threat of capricious international terrorism and new nuclear proliferation, the apparent certainties of the Cold War now even evoke a certain nostalgia, and its artefacts and structures are being recast as ‘heritage’.