Charles W J Withers
Biographic Data
| ID | 90683 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles W J Withers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles W J |
| FAMILY NAME | Withers |
| SIGNATURE | WITHERS C W J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 293 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Geographical print culture in the German-speaking territories, c.1690—c.1815
Disguise—Trust and Truth in Travel Writing
This article contends that “disguise” has been both overlooked in studies of travel writing and is more complex than current studies suppose. The performance of disguise raises important questions about trust—in the traveler, in the truth of what is narrated, and in the knowledge gained in exploration. The article examines examples of disguise in action: nineteenth-century exploration; woman travelers dressing as men; use of scientific instrument…
Instrument provision and geographical science: The work of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830– ca 1930
This paper examines the Royal Geographical Society's provision and management of scientific instruments to explorers and expeditions in the century following its foundation in 1830. Assessment of the Society's directives concerning appropriate scientific instruments for the conduct of geography reveals the emergence (slow and uneven) of policies concerning the assignment of instruments. From examination of Council minutes and related manuscript s…
The Work That Maps Do
Martin Brückner's The Social Life of Maps will appeal to scholars from many disciplines-material studies and English literature (his home fields), geography, American studies, and, not least, the U.S. historical community. Maps have never been the preserve of geographers, certainly not in their making nor, as Brückner convincingly shows, in the various practices of public and popular "mappery." One of the strengths of this book is that it re-affi…
Enlightenment Geographies
The Enlightenment, usually taken to be an intellectual phenomenon and a historical period, broadly equivalent to the “long” eighteenth century in Europe, should also be understood as a matter of geography with global reach and significance. The term “Enlightenment geographies” embraces three related concerns: the importance of where questions, and matters of scale, space, and place, in explaining what the Enlightenment was; the explanation of phi…
Language Geographies
The term “language geographies” involves the study of the changing geographical distribution and social usage of language, or of its constituent parts and variant forms, and of the ways in which language embodies and enables power and authority. Three main and related themes connecting the study of geography and language may be identified. The first includes the proper words we use to describe the world, geography's terminology included, and is e…
Space, geography and the global French Enlightenment
The Sage Handbook of Human Geography: Two Volume Set
Science, scientific instruments and questions of method in nineteenth‐century British geography
The paper explores the promotion of method in nineteenth‐century British geography. Attention is paid to the emphasis accorded scientific instruments in a period when scientific subjects were, in practice and in personnel, ‘disciplining’ themselves. The role ascribed to scientific instruments and method is examined with reference to the work in the Royal Geographical Society of Julian R. Jackson and his What to observe, or the traveller’s remembr…
The spectacular and the sacred: Narrating Landscape in Works of Travel
This article - drawing upon the archives of the London publisher John Murray - addresses the narration of landscape in 19th century printed accounts of travel and exploration. The geological work of the earth scientist Charles Lyell, and the textual and cartographic investigations of the scriptural geographer Edward Robinson, are used to examine the construction of narrative as a question of inscriptive practice, rhetorical desideratum, and inter…
Geographers Biobibliographical Studies
An annual collection of studies of individuals who have made major contributions to the development of geography and geographical thought.
Travels into print: Authoring, editing and narratives of travel and exploration, c .1815– c .1857
This paper examines the relationships between authorship and editing in the production of narratives of travel and exploration. The context to the paper is the widespread interest in exploration and travel writing in geography and related fields, and the materialist hermeneutic apparent in the conjunction of geography, book history and the history of science. Through assessment of archival and printed evidence relating to the authorship and editi…
Questions of Inscription and Epistemology in British Travelers’ Accounts of Early Nineteenth-Century South America
This article examines the problems of truth and of trust in travelers’ narratives. Following a review of work on travel writing and the place of printed travel narratives in the making of geographical enquiry, we discuss how issues of inscription and credibility are intrinsic to the material and epistemic transformation of narratives from their manuscript beginnings to their printed form. Particular attention is paid to the narratives of travel i…
Art, Science, Cartography, and the Eye of the Beholder
Map history is fertile interdisciplinary terrain. No longer the preserve of map historians presiding as custodian-interpreters of a simple mimetic truth, map history now involves historians, historians of art and of science, geographers, literary scholars, and, just as important, new forms of curatorial scholarship and responsibility. The purpose and interpretation of the large maps on display in one form or another between c.1450 and 1850 throug…
Journeys to Empire: Enlightenment, Imperialism, and the British Encounter with Tibet, 1774–1904 , by Gordon T. Stewart
"Journeys to Empire: Enlightenment, Imperialism, and the British Encounter with Tibet, 1774–1904, by Gordon T. Stewart.." Canadian Journal of History, 45(2), pp. 423–424
Complex locations: Women's geographical work in the UK 1850–1970 – By Avril Maddrell
Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in History
Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in History Charles W. J. Withers I. Introduction A few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits-and consequences-of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not…
Knowing our own history? Geography department archives in the UK
The paper presents an analysis of the returns to a questionnaire survey on the state of department archives within UK departments of geography. The results of the survey are discussed in relation to recent work in geography which has examined the archive as a site for knowledge's making but seldom in its own terms as a resource for the history of geography, and studies within the archival sciences which have considered the archive as something mo…
Science and Sociability: Women as Audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1901
This essay recovers the experiences of women at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) from its founding in 1831 to the end of the Victorian era. It aims to add to research on women in science by reconsidering the traditional role of women as consumers rather than producers of knowledge and to that on science popularization by focusing on audience experience rather than on the aims and strategies of populari…
Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason
The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History , by Christian Jacob
Geography's other histories? Geography and science in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831– c .1933
With reference to the history of modern geography in Britain and from assessment of the archives of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), this paper examines the role of the BAAS in promoting geography from the Association's foundation in 1831 to the 1930s. Particular attention is paid to BAAS Section E (Geography) in the period after 1851. Geography's place is considered with respect to its funding, content and relations…
Natural history societies, fieldwork and local knowledge in nineteenth-century Scotland: Towards a Historical Geography of Civic Science
This paper examines the role of fieldwork in the activities of natural history societies in Victorian Scotland. Fieldwork, it is argued, was an important constituent in the making of local natural knowledge. Being and doing ‘in the field’ was a means to establish through fieldwork given scientific fields and, in turn, to promote civic identity through scientific conduct
Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography and a British El Dorado , by D. Graham Burnett
Rethinking ‘disciplinary’ history: Geography in British universities, c. 1580–1887
Against a background of recent work in the history of geography and of geographical knowledge, the paper considers evidence for the place of geography within British universities before the formal establishment of the first departments of geography. Attention is paid to geography’s discursive connections with other subjects within given university curricula, and to the values placed upon its teaching by contemporaries. The paper argues that extan…
Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in History
Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in History Charles W. J. Withers I. Introduction A few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits-and consequences-of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not…
Place, Memory, Monument: Memorializing the Past in Contemporary Highland Scotland
Geography and Imperialism 1820-1940
List of figures and tables general editor's introduction notes on contributors introduction, Morag Bell et al agents and agencies in geography and empire - the case of George Grey, James M.R. Cameron imperialism and the discourse of desiccation the institutionalisation of global environmental concerns and the role of the Royal Geographical Society, 1860-1880, Richard Grove imperial landscapes - photography, geography and British exploration, 1858…
Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region
Examines the Highlands and islands of Scotland over a long period and charts their cultural transformation from a separate region into one where the processes of Anglicization have largely succeeded
Rethinking ‘disciplinary’ history: Geography in British universities, c. 1580–1887
Against a background of recent work in the history of geography and of geographical knowledge, the paper considers evidence for the place of geography within British universities before the formal establishment of the first departments of geography. Attention is paid to geography’s discursive connections with other subjects within given university curricula, and to the values placed upon its teaching by contemporaries. The paper argues that extan…
Constructing ‘the geographical archive’
The recent success of the RGS–IBG in securing funds to develop the Society’s archives provides a moment in which those interested in the history of geographical knowledge and of geography as an academic discipline might reflect on the nature of ‘the geographical archive’ that is constituted in and by the academic department. Drawing, in part, upon the work of Derrida and of Foucault, the paper firstly examines what an archive is and what it does.…
Natural history societies, fieldwork and local knowledge in nineteenth-century Scotland: Towards a Historical Geography of Civic Science
This paper examines the role of fieldwork in the activities of natural history societies in Victorian Scotland. Fieldwork, it is argued, was an important constituent in the making of local natural knowledge. Being and doing ‘in the field’ was a means to establish through fieldwork given scientific fields and, in turn, to promote civic identity through scientific conduct
Science and Sociability: Women as Audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1901
This essay recovers the experiences of women at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) from its founding in 1831 to the end of the Victorian era. It aims to add to research on women in science by reconsidering the traditional role of women as consumers rather than producers of knowledge and to that on science popularization by focusing on audience experience rather than on the aims and strategies of populari…
Geography's other histories? Geography and science in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831– c .1933
With reference to the history of modern geography in Britain and from assessment of the archives of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), this paper examines the role of the BAAS in promoting geography from the Association's foundation in 1831 to the 1930s. Particular attention is paid to BAAS Section E (Geography) in the period after 1851. Geography's place is considered with respect to its funding, content and relations…
Travels into print: Authoring, editing and narratives of travel and exploration, c .1815– c .1857
This paper examines the relationships between authorship and editing in the production of narratives of travel and exploration. The context to the paper is the widespread interest in exploration and travel writing in geography and related fields, and the materialist hermeneutic apparent in the conjunction of geography, book history and the history of science. Through assessment of archival and printed evidence relating to the authorship and editi…
Science, scientific instruments and questions of method in nineteenth‐century British geography
The paper explores the promotion of method in nineteenth‐century British geography. Attention is paid to the emphasis accorded scientific instruments in a period when scientific subjects were, in practice and in personnel, ‘disciplining’ themselves. The role ascribed to scientific instruments and method is examined with reference to the work in the Royal Geographical Society of Julian R. Jackson and his What to observe, or the traveller’s remembr…
The spectacular and the sacred: Narrating Landscape in Works of Travel
This article - drawing upon the archives of the London publisher John Murray - addresses the narration of landscape in 19th century printed accounts of travel and exploration. The geological work of the earth scientist Charles Lyell, and the textual and cartographic investigations of the scriptural geographer Edward Robinson, are used to examine the construction of narrative as a question of inscriptive practice, rhetorical desideratum, and inter…
Towards a History of Geography in the Public Sphere
L'A. etablit un lien entre les travaux recents sur les espaces et la nature de la connaissance dans l'histoire de la geographie et les ecrits de l'histoire des sciences sur le role de la science dans la culture publique et l'apprentissage
Geography, Natural History and the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment: Putting the World in Place
Geography, Natural History and the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment: Putting the World in Place Charles W. J. Withers Charles W. J. Withers Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 39, Issue 1, SPRING 1995, Pages 137–164, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/39.1.137 Published: 01 March 1995
Knowing our own history? Geography department archives in the UK
The paper presents an analysis of the returns to a questionnaire survey on the state of department archives within UK departments of geography. The results of the survey are discussed in relation to recent work in geography which has examined the archive as a site for knowledge's making but seldom in its own terms as a resource for the history of geography, and studies within the archival sciences which have considered the archive as something mo…
Disguise—Trust and Truth in Travel Writing
This article contends that “disguise” has been both overlooked in studies of travel writing and is more complex than current studies suppose. The performance of disguise raises important questions about trust—in the traveler, in the truth of what is narrated, and in the knowledge gained in exploration. The article examines examples of disguise in action: nineteenth-century exploration; woman travelers dressing as men; use of scientific instrument…
Questions of Inscription and Epistemology in British Travelers’ Accounts of Early Nineteenth-Century South America
This article examines the problems of truth and of trust in travelers’ narratives. Following a review of work on travel writing and the place of printed travel narratives in the making of geographical enquiry, we discuss how issues of inscription and credibility are intrinsic to the material and epistemic transformation of narratives from their manuscript beginnings to their printed form. Particular attention is paid to the narratives of travel i…
Complex locations: Women's geographical work in the UK 1850–1970 – By Avril Maddrell
A Geography of Language: Gaelic-Speaking in Perthshire, 1698-1879
To be anything more than a narrative of distributional shifts, the geographical study of languages and their change over space and time should investigate the social processes underlying language usage as well as the spatial extent of language areas. Studies of the changing geography of the Celtic languages within Great Britain have provided much insight into the nature and patterns of language shift over space and time and the social processes a…
A Geography of Language: Gaelic-Speaking in Perthshire, 1698-1879
To be anything more than a narrative of distributional shifts, the geographical study of languages and their change over space and time should investigate the social processes underlying language usage as well as the spatial extent of language areas. Studies of the changing geography of the Celtic languages within Great Britain have provided much insight into the nature and patterns of language shift over space and time and the social processes a…
Gaelic in Scotland, 1698-1981: The Geographical History of a Language
Gaelic in Scotland 1698-1981: The Geographical History of a Language
Population mobility in Scotland and Europe, 1600-1900: A comparative perspective
Scottish social and demographic history has seen important developments in the last two decades. Patterns of population turnover, permanent mobility, and emigration are now becoming clear. This article summarises a large body of recent literature on geographical mobility and sets population movement in its social and economic context. A relatively "traditional" economy and society in the seventeenth century, Scotland industrialised rapidly in the…
Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region
Examines the Highlands and islands of Scotland over a long period and charts their cultural transformation from a separate region into one where the processes of Anglicization have largely succeeded
Short notices
John K. Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence, 1537–1609 (1992), ix + 160 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £24.95). Beverley Lemire, Fashion's Favourite. The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (1992), xii + 244 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, £30.00). Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago. The Life and Times of Catherine Macaulay, Historian (1992), xiv + 263 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £30.00). Ch…
Urbanising Britain: Essays on Class and Community in the Nineteenth Century
List of figures List of tables Preface Notes on contributors Introduction: class, community and the processes of urbanisation Gerry Kearns and Charles W. J. Withers 1. Biology, class and the urban penalty Gerry Kearns 2. Public space and local communities: the example of Birmingham, 1840-1880 Bill Bramwell 3. Class, culture and migrant identity: Gaelic Highlanders in urban Scotland Charles W. J. Withers 4. The country and the city: sexuality and …
Conceptions of cultural landscape change in upland North Wales: A case study of Llanbedr-y-Cennin and Caerhun parishes, c. 1560- c. 1891
(1995). Conceptions of cultural landscape change in upland North Wales: a case study of Llanbedr-y-Cennin and Caerhun parishes, c. 1560-c. 1891. Landscape History: Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 35-47
Geography, Natural History and the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment: Putting the World in Place
Geography, Natural History and the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment: Putting the World in Place Charles W. J. Withers Charles W. J. Withers Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 39, Issue 1, SPRING 1995, Pages 137–164, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/39.1.137 Published: 01 March 1995
Geography and Imperialism 1820-1940
List of figures and tables general editor's introduction notes on contributors introduction, Morag Bell et al agents and agencies in geography and empire - the case of George Grey, James M.R. Cameron imperialism and the discourse of desiccation the institutionalisation of global environmental concerns and the role of the Royal Geographical Society, 1860-1880, Richard Grove imperial landscapes - photography, geography and British exploration, 1858…
Place, Memory, Monument: Memorializing the Past in Contemporary Highland Scotland
Making Space for Geographies of Modernity
Journal Article Making Space for Geographies of Modernity Get access Ogborn Miles , Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies 1680–1780 , Guilford Press , 1998 Charles W. J. Withers Charles W. J. Withers Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 48, Issue 1, AUTUMN 1999, Pages 248–252, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/1999.48.248 Published: 01 October 1999
Towards a History of Geography in the Public Sphere
L'A. etablit un lien entre les travaux recents sur les espaces et la nature de la connaissance dans l'histoire de la geographie et les ecrits de l'histoire des sciences sur le role de la science dans la culture publique et l'apprentissage
John Adair 1660–1718
English Maps: A History . Catherine Delano-Smith , Roger J. P. Kain
Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography and a British El Dorado , by D. Graham Burnett
Rethinking ‘disciplinary’ history: Geography in British universities, c. 1580–1887
Against a background of recent work in the history of geography and of geographical knowledge, the paper considers evidence for the place of geography within British universities before the formal establishment of the first departments of geography. Attention is paid to geography’s discursive connections with other subjects within given university curricula, and to the values placed upon its teaching by contemporaries. The paper argues that extan…
Constructing ‘the geographical archive’
The recent success of the RGS–IBG in securing funds to develop the Society’s archives provides a moment in which those interested in the history of geographical knowledge and of geography as an academic discipline might reflect on the nature of ‘the geographical archive’ that is constituted in and by the academic department. Drawing, in part, upon the work of Derrida and of Foucault, the paper firstly examines what an archive is and what it does.…
Natural history societies, fieldwork and local knowledge in nineteenth-century Scotland: Towards a Historical Geography of Civic Science
This paper examines the role of fieldwork in the activities of natural history societies in Victorian Scotland. Fieldwork, it is argued, was an important constituent in the making of local natural knowledge. Being and doing ‘in the field’ was a means to establish through fieldwork given scientific fields and, in turn, to promote civic identity through scientific conduct
Geography's other histories? Geography and science in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831– c .1933
With reference to the history of modern geography in Britain and from assessment of the archives of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), this paper examines the role of the BAAS in promoting geography from the Association's foundation in 1831 to the 1930s. Particular attention is paid to BAAS Section E (Geography) in the period after 1851. Geography's place is considered with respect to its funding, content and relations…
Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason
The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History , by Christian Jacob
Knowing our own history? Geography department archives in the UK
The paper presents an analysis of the returns to a questionnaire survey on the state of department archives within UK departments of geography. The results of the survey are discussed in relation to recent work in geography which has examined the archive as a site for knowledge's making but seldom in its own terms as a resource for the history of geography, and studies within the archival sciences which have considered the archive as something mo…
Science and Sociability: Women as Audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1901
This essay recovers the experiences of women at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) from its founding in 1831 to the end of the Victorian era. It aims to add to research on women in science by reconsidering the traditional role of women as consumers rather than producers of knowledge and to that on science popularization by focusing on audience experience rather than on the aims and strategies of populari…
Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in History
Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in History Charles W. J. Withers I. Introduction A few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits-and consequences-of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not…
Sociology (26 works) · Geography (25 works) · History (22 works) · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought (20 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Social science (13 works) · History of Science and Natural History (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Human geography (11 works)