Review of Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity. G. Dawson, B. Lightman (Eds.). University of Chicago, 2014. This anthology adds to a recent spate of publications devoted to ‘‘scientific naturalism,’’ including two other books published in 2014. This particular volume enhances our understanding of the creed and its advocates. But it also challenges its conceptual and historical coherence, despite the editors’ claims that the term should be accepted as a valid actors’ category and guide for historiography. A few of the most impressive essays in this volume challenge at least the first assertion, although this reviewer believes that the editors are correct in both claims. Published in Endeavour Vol. 39, No. 1. March 2015. Click here or on title.
Review of The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries. Bernard Lightman, Michael S. Reidy (editors). Pickering & Chatto, 2014. Published in Endeavour Vol. 38, No. 3–4 . September 6, 2014. Click here or on title.
Review of Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition. Patricia Donahue and Gretchen Flesher Moon, editors. A new anthology from the University of Pittsburgh Press Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture will be of interest to historians of American com position pedagogy and practice. Local Histories locates the archives of composition-rhetoric from the 1840s to the late 1960s in liberal arts colleges, normal schools, the junior college movement, and Lincoln University, the first of the so-called Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). Published in College Composition and Communication. Vol. 60, No. 2 (December 2008), pp. w53-w57. Click here or on title.
