The Historical Sciences: A Bibliographic Introduction

Version of March 1993

This bibliography was compiled by Robert J. O’Hara (rjohara@post.harvard.edu) for the Darwin-L discussion group, and the master copy is maintained in the Files section of the Darwin-L Archives (rjohara.net/darwin). It is a brief listing of a few works that can serve as introductions to the special character of the historical sciences of evolution, geology, and philology. It is not meant to be comprehensive, and it has not been compiled with any special rationale in mind. It may be freely distributed in print or electronically as long as the references and this header remain intact. Additional bibliographies on the history of systematics, on trees of history, on narrative in the historical sciences, and on the works of Stephen Toulmin are also available in the Darwin-L Archives.

• Aarsleff, Hans. 1967. The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Albury, William R., & David R. Oldroyd. 1977. From Renaissance mineral studies to historical geology, in the light of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. British Journal for the History of Science, 10: 187–215.
• Browne, Janet. 1983. The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Brush, Stephen G. 1987. The nebular hypothesis and the evolutionary world view. History of Science, 25: 245–278.
• Burrow, J. 1967. The uses of philology in Victorian England. Pp. 180-204 in: Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (R. Robson, ed.). London.
• Christy, Craig. 1983. Uniformitarianism in Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science. Series III, Studies in the History of Linguistics, vol. 31.)
• Gould, Stephen J. 1987. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Gould, Stephen J. 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: Norton.
• Greene, John C. 1959. The Death of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought. Ames: University of Iowa Press.
• Haber, Frances C. 1959. The Age of the World: Moses to Darwin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Hodge, Michael J.S. 1991. The history of the earth, life, and man: Whewell and palaetiological science. Pp. 255–288 in: William Whewell: A Composite Portrait (Menachem Fisch & Simon Schaffer, eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Hoenigswald, Henry M., & Linda F. Wiener, eds. 1987. Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Lyell, Charles. 1830–1833. Principles of Geology. London: John Murray. [Facsimile reprint edited by Martin Rudwick, University of Chicago Press, 1990.]
• Lyon, John, & Phillip R. Sloan, eds. 1981. From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and His Critics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
• Miller, Hugh. 1939. History and Science. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Nitecki, Matthew H., & Doris V. Nitecki, eds. 1992. History and Evolution. Albany: State University of New York Press.
• O’Hara, Robert J. 1988. Homage to Clio, or toward an historical philosophy for evolutionary biology. Systematic Zoology, 37: 142–155.
• O’Hara, Robert J. 1992. Telling the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary history. Biology and Philosophy, 6: 255–274.
• Oldroyd, David R. 1979. Historicism and the rise of historical geology. History of Science, 17: 191–213, 227–257.
• Rossi, Paolo. 1984. The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Rudwick, Martin J.S. 1977. Historical analogies in the geological work of Charles Lyell. Janus, 64: 89–107.
• Rudwick, Martin J.S. 1992. Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Shapiro, Barbara. 1979. History and natural history in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England: an essay on the relationship between humanism and science. Pp. 1–55 in: English Scientific Virtuosi in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Papers read at a Clark Library Seminar, 5 February 1977 by Barbara Shapiro and Robert G. Frank, Jr. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California.
• Sloan, Phillip R. 1985. From logical universals to historical individuals: Buffon’s idea of biological species. Pp. 101–140 in: Histoire du Concept d’Espèce dans les Sciences de la Vie. Paris: Fondation Singer-Polignac.
• Sloan, Phillip R. 1990. Natural history, 1670–1802. Pp. 295–313 in: Companion to the History of Modern Science (Robert C. Olby et al., eds.). London: Routledge.
• Sober, Elliott. 1988. Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Toulmin, Stephen E., & June Goodfield. 1965. The Discovery of Time. New York: Harper & Row. [Reprinted by University of Chicago Press.]
• Trigger, Bruce G. 1989. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.