Sommer, Marianne (Author)
The essay focuses on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875--1950)---the creator of Tarzan---and his contemporary and president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857--1935). These historical figures are of interest as multimedia-versed shapers of collective fantasies of human evolution. Both men created and drew on science and fiction to produce vraisemblance in their reconstructions of human prehistory, and thus to achieve suspension of disbelief. Their main tools were arguably very different: one organized expeditions to collect fossils and installed a staff of artists and technicians at the museum to reconstruct the fossil creatures; the other turned himself into a writing-factory, producing as large an amount of words per day as possible. As is shown, the two cultures nonetheless interacted on the level of structure as well as content when bringing the dinosaurs and cavemen to life in fully equipped prehistoric worlds. The resulting windows into the human deep past were meant to educate the public through entertainment. Osborn and Burroughs engaged in interesting experiment[s] in the mental laboratory which we call imagination when they made different races, sexes, and national types compete in prehistoric struggles for existence. The laboratory setups were to reveal natural hierarchies, but they were also intended to transform the reader/viewer. The verbal and visual reconstructions of lost worlds served Burroughs's and Osborn's conservatism: the true American/Anglo-Saxon type had to be preserved, if not recovered.
...MoreDescription Focuses on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs and president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn.
Thesis
Brinkman, Paul David;
(2005)
The Second American Jurassic Dinosaur Rush, 1895--1905
(/isis/citation/CBB001561600/)
Article
Homchick, Julie;
(2010)
Objects and Objectivity: The Evolution Controversy at the American Museum of Natural History, 1915--1928
(/isis/citation/CBB001032818/)
Book
Regal, Brian;
(2002)
Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man
(/isis/citation/CBB000201525/)
Book
Brian Noble;
(2016)
Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB580544384/)
Article
David Ceccarelli;
(2021)
Theistic evolution and evolutionary ethics: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Huxley’s legacy
(/isis/citation/CBB339183866/)
Article
Brinkman, Paul D.;
(2005)
Henry Fairfield Osborn and Jurassic Dinosaur Reconnaissance in the San Juan Basin, Along the Colorado-Utah Border, 1893--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB000630876/)
Article
Sommer, Marianne;
(2011)
Human Tools of the European Tertiary? Artefacts, Brains and Minds in Evolutionist Reasoning, 1870--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001022769/)
Chapter
Gliboff, Sander;
(2011)
The Golden Age of Lamarckism, 1866--1926
(/isis/citation/CBB001500084/)
Article
Sommer, Marianne;
(2010)
Seriality in the Making: The Osborn-Knight Restorations of Evolutionary History
(/isis/citation/CBB001023535/)
Thesis
Nichols, Rachael L.;
(2010)
The Human Animal: Tangles in Science and Literature, 1870--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001567211/)
Article
David Ceccarelli;
(2021)
“The bad habit of wandering”: Morgan, Osborn and the issue of evolutionary causality in genetics and paleontology
(/isis/citation/CBB874691467/)
Article
Manias, Chris;
(2015)
Building Baluchitherium and Indricotherium: Imperial and International Networks in Early-Twentieth Century Paleontology
(/isis/citation/CBB001551823/)
Article
Katherine McLeod;
(2022)
The Call of the Hoatzin: Ecology, Evolution, and Eugenics at the Bronx Zoo
(/isis/citation/CBB199228100/)
Thesis
Paton, Miranda Vierra;
(2008)
Vertebrate Paleontology and the Evolutionary Synthesis, 1894--1944
(/isis/citation/CBB001560692/)
Article
Jordan D. II Marché;
(2019)
“Giant Birds of Old”: An 1837 poem by James Dwight Dana (?) on the supposed makers of the Connecticut Valley's fossil trackways
(/isis/citation/CBB796867178/)
Book
Cuddy, Lois A.;
Roche, Claire M.;
(2003)
Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940: Essays on Ideological Conflict and Complicity
(/isis/citation/CBB000500826/)
Book
Bender, Bert;
(2004)
Evolution and “the Sex Problem”: American Narratives during the Eclipse of Darwinism
(/isis/citation/CBB000550763/)
Thesis
Bruni, John P.;
(2003)
Making the Fittest Culture: Social Darwinism and American Naturalist Writing at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001560857/)
Thesis
Kaufman, Scott Eric;
(2008)
Maximal Diversity: Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory in American Fiction, 1895--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001561264/)
Article
Robertson, Thomas;
(2012)
Total War and the Total Environment: Fairfield Osborn, William Vogt, and the Birth of Global Ecology
(/isis/citation/CBB001232554/)
Be the first to comment!