Modern Nature
The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany
Publication supported by the Susan Elizabeth Abrams Fund in History of Science
- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: The Biological Perspective and the Problem of a Modern Nature
Identity, Mobility, and Place
Popular Science and Populist Natural History
The Biological Perspective and the History of Biology
Ghosts and Shadows
Tracing the Biological Perspective
CHAPTER TWO
Bringing Life to Natural History
Practical and Popular Natural History
The Taxidermic Life
Against the “Terrorism of System”: Martin on Taxidermic Displays
Stuttgart: Representing Nature for the Fatherland
Commercial Displays: Nature as Spectacle
Bringing Nature’s Past to Life
Public/Private, Science/Art, Elite/Popular: Natural History Institutions and Values
CHAPTER THREE
The World in Miniature: Practical Natural History and the Zoo Movement
The Zoo as a Cultural Institution
Designing a World in Miniature
Caring for Animals: From Daily Life to Nature Protection
The Circulation of People and Ideas
Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR
From Practice to Theory: Karl Möbius and the Lebensgemeinschaft
Karl Möbius: Upwardly Striving Youth
Natural History in Hamburg
Natural History Activist
The Fauna of the Kiel Fjord
From Hamburg to Kiel
The Oyster and Oyster-Culture
Conclusion: Social Mobility and Ecological Theory
CHAPTER FIVE
The “Living Community” in the Classroom
Natural History and School Reform
Friedrich Junge and The Village Pond
The Spread of the Village Pond Gospel
The Village Pond Curriculum as Heimatkunde
Conclusion
CHAPTER SIX
Reforming the Natural History Museum, 1880–1900
The Emergence of the Professional Curator
The Institutional Landscape
Dual Arrangement
The Museum as a Center for Biological Knowledge
Conclusion
CHAPTER SEVEN
Biological Groups, Nature, and Culture in the Museum
The Kunde Projects
The Museum für Natur-, Völker-, und Handelskunde in Bremen (1896)
The Altona City Museum (1901) and Heimatkunde
The Museum für Meereskunde (1906)
Biological Groups, Modernity, and the Representation of Nature
CHAPTER EIGHT
From Biology to Ecology
Biologie and Secondary School Reform
Biologie as Popular Natural History
From Biology to Ecology
Pedagogical, Popular, and Professional Ecology
CHAPTER NINE
Museum Research and the Rise of Ecological Animal Geography
Exploring Life in the Ocean
Making Animal Geography Ecological
Ecological versus Historical Zoogeography
Ecological Animal Geography and the German Natural History Museum
CHAPTER TEN
Modern Nature
Bibliography
Index
“Modern Nature is a wonderful book. Lynn Nyhart’s lucid prose, breadth of scholarship, overall historical sweep, and wealth of insights combine to produce a model study. A highly original work.”
“Lynn Nyhart brings a dazzling range of knowledge to this rich account of German natural history and biology at the end of the nineteenth century. Museums and zoos have rarely looked so significant before. Moving fluently from the art of making animal exhibits for popular education to the rise of populist, community-based ideas that led to ecological thought, her story explores the growing conviction that a love for nature was a defining feature of the German national character. Every page adds exciting new angles to our understanding of the ways that science got done in the past.”
“In this highly innovative book, Lynn Nyhart shows how a series of ‘practical natural historians,’ including taxidermists, museum curators, zookeepers, and elementary school teachers rejected what they deemed lifeless classificatory science in favor of a dynamic and integrated biological understanding of nature. Nyhart shows how this new perspective both ‘trickled out’ and ‘trickled up,’ and in the process transformed both scholarly and popular views of the natural world. Full of carefully considered insights into the interactions between practical naturalists, specialized scientists, and nineteenth-century German cultural institutions, Modern Nature tells a wonderfully rich and extremely important story. This exemplary contribution to the cultural history of science should also be a must-read for scholars of German history, museum studies, intellectual history, and German studies.”
“In Modern Nature, Lynn Nyhart retrieves from the dark well of history a popular or ‘populist’ biology that flourished a century ago on the cultural fringes of German academic science—in museums, zoos, and secondary schools. Unlike elite zoology, ‘Naturkunde,’ or nature studies, depicted animals as living communities in actual environments. Its advocates—curators, taxidermists, teachers, writers—took pains to relate science to the lived experience of ordinary citizens. Their humanized, public science has much relevance to contemporary environmentalism. It’s an eye-opening and a compelling story.”
“Ecology, Nyhart argues in her absorbing new study, developed in German cultural institutions in the public sphere, such as museums, libraries, and botanical and zoological gardens, rather than in the elite realm of university science. Instead of treating the different facets of ‘popular’ separately, she offers us a common history that integrates them into one powerful cultural force capable of changing the face of ‘elite’ science. Setting her analysis of the practical naturalists firmly into the social and cultural context of late nineteenth-century Germany, Nyhart has produced a major contribution to our understanding of how a new biological perspective became integrated into modern science. This book is a must read.”
University of Chicago Press: Susan E. Abrams Prize in History of Science
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