Escucha y lee

Entra en un mundo infinito de historias

  • Vive la experiencia de leer y escuchar todo lo que quieras
  • Más de 650.000 títulos
  • Títulos en exclusiva y Storytel Originals
  • Primeros 14 días gratis, luego 8,99 €/mes
  • Cancela cuando quieras
Suscríbete ahora
Details page - Device banner - 894x1036
Cover for Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature

Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature

Idioma
Inglés
Formato
Categoría

Historia

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero here takes sides in one of the great controversies of the early nineteenth century--one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts of New York City. In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular--and biblically sanctioned--view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake. Burnett vividly recreates the trial, during which a parade of experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of interior anatomy--and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God's creatures.

When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast churned both the natural and social orders--and not everyone would survive.

© 2010 Princeton University Press (Ebook): 9781400833986

Fecha de lanzamiento

Ebook: 4 de enero de 2010

Otros también disfrutaron ...

Elige el plan:

  • Más de 650.000 títulos

  • Kids mode

  • Modo sin conexión

  • Cancela cuando quieras

¡Más popular!

Unlimited

Para los que quieren escuchar y leer sin límites.

8.99 € /mes
14 días gratis
  • 1 cuenta

  • Acceso ilimitado

  • Escucha y lee los títulos que quieras

  • Modo sin conexión + Kids Mode

  • Cancela en cualquier momento

Suscríbete ahora

Family

Para los que quieren compartir historias con su familia y amigos.

Desde 15.99 €/mes
  • 2-3 cuentas

  • Acceso ilimitado

  • Escucha y lee los títulos que quieras

  • Modo sin conexión + Kids Mode

  • Cancela en cualquier momento

2 cuentas

15.99 € /mes
Pruébalo ahora