Christine Garwood
Flat Earth
The History of An Infamous Idea
Macmillan 2007
Stron XII+436, format: 16x24 cm
38 ilustracji czarno-białych na wklejkach
Książka jest nowa
Contrary to popular belief, fostered in countless classrooms across the world, Christopher Columbus was not the first to discover that the earth was roun The idea of a spherical world had been widely accepted in educated circles from as early as the fourth century BC. Yet, bizarrely, it was not until the supposedly more rational nineteenth century that the notion of a flat earth really took hold.
Meticulously researched and compellingly readable, Christine Garwood provides the first definitive account of this 'infamous idea'. She explodes the mvths surrounding Columbus and the battles between science and religion, explores the wilder shores of flat-earth belief and establishes, without doubt, that the world is most emphatically not flat.
From Samuel 'Parallax' Rowbotham and his slick advocacy of Zetetic, or free-thinking, astronomy to Darwin's friend and collaborator, Alfred Russel Wallace, and his wager with the flat-earther John Hampden; from Lady Blount's earnest pamphleteering in the flat-earth cause to Wilbur Glenn Voliva's belief that there was no such thing as gravity; from the English Flat Earth Society's campaign against the Apollo missions to the work of sister organizations in America and Canada, Garwood's book is a remarkable study of strange obsessions and sometimes stranger individuals. Thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating, it is social and intellectual history at its best.
Contents
Acknowledgements x
Prologue - The Columbus Blunder i
One - Surveying the Earth 15
Two - A Public Sensation 36
Three - The Infamous Flat-earth Wager 79
Four - Trials and Tribulations 118
Five - Lady Blount and the New Zetetics 154
Six - Flat-earth Utopia 188
Seven - Man on the Moon? 219
Eight — The View from the Edge 280
Nine - The Californian Connection 315
Epilogue - Myths and Meanings 350
Appendix 363
Abbreviations 370
Notes jp Bibliography 401
Index 424
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