Page 36 - DLIS407_INFORMATION AND LITERATURE SURVEY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Unit 4: Historical Development of Sociology and History Disciplines

4.2.3 Natural History Notes

Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492 transformed natural history perhaps more than
any it did other early modern science. The ensuing development of European maritime empires
of trade and commerce opened new routes for the acquisition of specimens, supplied museums of
natural history with countless new species, and ultimately shaped natural history itself into a science
intimately embedded within European systems of colonial governance over non-European peoples,
floras, and faunas.
Natural history, as a discipline, had existed since classical times, and fifteenth-century Europeans
were very familiar with Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (40–79 c.e.; Natural history). Throughout
the early modern period, natural history continued to be acknowledged as the science that described
the three kingdoms of the natural world: animals, plants, and minerals. Many other types of enquiry
and interpretation would be undertaken under the umbrella term natural history between 1450 and
1789, but natural history as an enterprise of acquisition and description was mirrored in the sites in
which it was practiced: collections. The early modern museum, cabinet, Wunderkammer (‘chamber
of wonders’) or studio (‘study’) developed out of the medieval treasury and other settings—usually
princely or ecclesiastical—in which rare, precious, and exotic items were amassed. During the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, collections continued to be largely the province of princely owners,
making visible not only their personal wealth, but also their ability to gain access to unique objects
from other parts of the world. Universality and comprehensiveness was the leading characteristic
of these collections, which were designed as microcosms of the whole world, and in which natural
rarities and works of artifice were not separated. Early modern collections were both showpieces that
displayed power and repositories that preserved value.

Self Assessment

State whether the following statements are True or False:
3. Economic emerged in the late nineteenth century as an academic field devoted to the study
of past economic phenomena and processes.
4. Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1946 transformed natural history.

4.3 Summary

y Sociology is a “humanistic” social science even through it aims at objectivity in social
observations. It has to take care of ideas and ideals, values and behaviour, aspirations and
achievements, problems and predicaments of human beings in society.
y The discipline of history deals with the study of events and development in particular time
periods or geographical / regional historical studies. It can be further categorized in sub-fields
such as social history, diplomatic history, gender history and even history of people.
y Social history emerged as a discipline over the course of about twenty years at the conjunction
of two seemingly contradictory schools of historical writing: English social history and the
French Annales School.

y Economic history emerged in the late nineteenth century as an academic field devoted to the
study of past economic phenomena and processes.
y Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492 transformed natural history perhaps more
than any it did other early modern science.

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