Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Reflections on Darwin Historiography

  • Historiographical Essay
  • Published:
Journal of the History of Biology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Much has happened in the Darwin field since the Correspondence began publishing in 1985. This overview of historiography suggests that the richness of the letters generates fresh scholarly questions and that Darwin, paradoxically, is becoming progressively deconstructed as a key figure in the history of science.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Anon. 1942. Darwin Manuscripts and Letters, Gifts to Cambridge and Down House. Nature 150: 585

    Google Scholar 

  • Ayres, Peter. 2008. The Aliveness of Plants: The Darwins at the Dawn of Plant Science. London: Pickering and Chatto.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barlow, Nora, ed. 1958. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882. New York: W. W. Norton; London: Collins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barrett, Paul H., Peter Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sydney Smith, eds. 1987. Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries. London: Natural History Museum; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Bashford, Alison, ed. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Beer, Gillian. 1983. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bellon, Richard. 2011. Inspiration in the Harness of Daily Labor: Darwin, Botany, and the Triumph of Evolution, 1859–1868. Isis 102: 393–420.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berry, Andrew. ed. 2003. Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bossi, Laura, ed. 2021. Les origins du monde. L’invention de la nature au XIXème siècle. Paris and Montreal: Musée d’Orsay.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowlby, John. 1992. Charles Darwin: A New Life. New York: W. W. Norton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowler, Peter J. 1975. The Changing Meaning of “Evolution.” Journal of the History of Ideas 36: 95–114.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bowler, Peter J. 1983. The Eclipse of Darwinism, Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowler, Peter J. 1988. The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowler, Peter J. 2007. Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons; Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bowler, Peter J. 2013. Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World Without Darwin. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Brooke, John H. 1991. Science and Religion, Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Browne, Janet. 1995. Charles Darwin: Voyaging. Vol. 1. New York: Alfred Knopf Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Browne, Janet. 1998. I Could Have Retched All Night: Charles Darwin and His Body. In Science Incarnate: Historical embodiments of Natural Knowledge, eds. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, 240–287. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Browne, Janet. 2001. Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popularisation and Dissemination of Evolution. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145: 496–509.

  • Browne, Janet. 2002. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. Vol. 2. New York: Alfred Knopf Inc.

  • Browne, Janet. 2005. Commemorating Darwin. British Journal for the History of Science 36: 251–274.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Browne, Janet. 2010. Making Darwin: Biography and Changing Representations of Charles Darwin. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40: 347–373.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buchanan, Roderick D. 2017. Darwin’s “Mr. Arthrobalanus”: Sexual Differentiation, Evolutionary Destiny and the Expert Eye of the Beholder. Journal of the History of Biology 50: 2: 315–355.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buchanan, Roderick D. 2021. Syndrome du jour: The Historiography and Moral Implications of Diagnosing Darwin. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 90: 86–101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buchanan, Roderick D., and James Bradley. 2017. “Darwin’s Delay”: A Reassessment of the Evidence. Isis 108: 3: 529–552.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Burkhardt, Frederick H., and Sydney Smith, eds. 1985. A Calendar to the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1821–1882. New York: Garland; rev ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

  • Burkhardt, Frederick, et al., eds. 1985–2022. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 30 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Cain, Joe, and Michael Ruse, eds. 2009. Descended from Darwin: Insights into the History of Evolutionary Studies, 1900–1970. (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 99, pt. 1.) Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.

  • Cañizares-Esguerra, J. 2006. How Derivative Was Humboldt? Microcosmic Narratives in Early Modern Spanish America and the (Other) Origins of Humboldt’s Ecological Sensibilities. In Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World, ed. J. Cañizares-Esguerra, 112–128. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Cazden, Elizabeth. 1983. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, A Biography. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Churchill, Frederick B. 1982. Darwin and the Historian. In Charles Darwin: A Commemoration 1882–1982: Happy Is the Man That Findeth Wisdom, ed. R. J. Berry, 45–68. London: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, Constance. 2008. God—or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Colp, Ralph. 2000. More on Darwin’s Illness. History of Science 38: 219–236.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Colp, Ralph. 1977. To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Corsi, Pietro. 1988. Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Corsi, Pietro. 1989. The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories in France, 1790–1830. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Costa, J. T. 2014. Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Costa, J. T. 2017. Darwin’s Backyard: How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

  • Coyne, Jerry A. 2009. Why Evolution is True. New York: Viking.

    Google Scholar 

  • Darwin, Charles Robert. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Darwin, Charles Robert. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2 vols. London: John Murray.

  • Darwin, Francis, and A. C. Seward, eds. 1903. More Letters of Charles Darwin. 2 vols. London: John Murray.

  • Darwin, Francis, ed. 1887. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. 3 vols. London: John Murray.

  • Darwin, Francis, ed. 1909. The Foundations of the Origin of Species: Two Essays Written in 1842 and 1844. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Dawson, Gowan. 2007. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Beer, Gavin, M. J., Rowlands, and B. M. Skramovsky. 1960–1967. Darwin’s Notebooks on Transmutation of Species. British Museum (Natural History) Bulletin 2 (1960): 25–183; 2 (1961): 185–200; 3 (1967): 129–176.

  • De Chadarevian, Soraya. 1996. Laboratory Science Versus Country-House Experiments: The Controversy Between Julius Sachs and Charles Darwin. British Journal for the History of Science 29: 17–41.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. 1991. Darwin. London: Michael Joseph.

  • Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. 2009. Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins. London: Allen Lane.

    Google Scholar 

  • Di Gregorio, Mario. 1991. Charles Darwin’s Marginalia. With the assistance of Nick Gill. New York: Garland.

    Google Scholar 

  • Donald, Diana, and Jane Munro, eds. 2009. Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts. (Exhibition catalogue.) New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  • Driver, Felix, Mark Nesbitt, and Caroline Cornish, eds. 2021. Mobile Museums: Collections in Circulation. London: UCL Press.

  • Eddy, M., and David Knight. 2005. Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700–1900. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Elshakry, Marwa. 2014. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Endersby, Jim. 2008. Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Engels, Eve-Marie, and Thomas F. Glick, eds. 2008. The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe. London: Continuum.

  • Fichman, Martin. 2003. An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Fuentes, Agustin. 2021. “On the Races of Man”: Race, Racism, Science, and Hope. In A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution, ed. Jeremy Desilva, 144–161. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Fyfe, Aileen. 1997. The Reception of William Paley’s Natural Theology in the University of Cambridge. British Journal for the History of Science 30 (3): 321–335.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gayon, Jean, ed. 2010. A Non-Darwinian Darwin: An Introduction. Comptes Rendus Biologies 333 (2): 83–86.

  • Gianquitto, Tina, and Lydia Fisher, eds. 2014. America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gillespie, Neil. 1979. Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Glick, Thomas F., and Elinor Shaffer, eds. 2014. The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gruber, H. E. 1974. Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Creativity. New York: Dutton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hale, Piers J. 2014. Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hamlin, Kimberly A. 2014. From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Harvey, Joy. 1997. Almost a Man of Genius: Clémence Royer, Feminism, and Nineteenth-Century Science. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harvey, Joy. 2009. Darwin’s “Angels”: The Women Correspondents of Charles Darwin. Intellectual History Review 19 (2): 197–210.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hawkins, M. 1997. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hennessy, Elizabeth. 2019. On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galapagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Herbert, Sandra. 1974–1977. The Place of Man in the Development of Darwin’s Theory of Transmutation. Journal of the History of Biology 7: 217–258; 10: 155–227.

  • Hodge, Jonathan, and Gregory Radick, eds. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hodge, Jonathan. 1985. Darwin as a Lifelong Generation Theorist. In The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn, 207–243. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press in association with Nova Pacifica.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hofstadter, Richard. 1944. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rev. ed. 1992.

  • Hoorn, Jeanette. 2009. Reframing Darwin: Evolution and Art in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • James, Frank. 2005. An Open Clash Between Science and the Church? In Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700–1900, eds. M. Eddy, and D. Knight, 171–193. Aldershot: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kevles, Daniel J. 1985. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Rev ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keynes, Randal. 2001. Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution. London: Fourth Estate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keynes, Richard D., ed. 1979. The Beagle Record: Selections From the Original Pictorial Records and Written Accounts of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keynes, Richard D., ed. 2000. Charles Darwin’s Zoology Notes and Specimen Lists from H.M.S. Beagle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kohlstedt, S. G., and M. R. Jorgensen. 1999. The “Irrepressible Woman Question”: Women’s Responses to Evolutionary Ideology. In Disseminating Darwinism; The Role of Place, Race, Religion and Gender, eds. R. L Numbers and J. Stenhouse, 267–293. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Kohn, David, ed. 1985. The Darwinian Heritage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kohn, David. 1989. Darwin’s Ambiguity: The Secularization of Biological Meaning. British Journal for the History of Science 22: 215-239.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kort, Pamela, and Max Hollein, eds. 2009. Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins. Cologne: Weinand Verlag.

  • La Vergata, Antonello. 1985. Images of Darwin: A Historiographic Overview. In The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn, 901–972. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Larson, Edward J. 1997. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Larson, Edward J. 2001. Evolution’s Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levine, George. 1988. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levine, George. 2008. Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lightman, Bernard. 1987. The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lightman, Bernard. 2007. The Evolution of the Evolutionary Epic. In Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences, ed. Bernard Lightman, 219-294, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Lightman, Bernard. 2010. The Many Lives of Charles Darwin: Early Biographies and the Definitive Evolutionist. Notes and Records of the Royal Society 64: 339–358.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lightman, Bernard, ed. 2015. Global Spencerism: The Communication and Appropriation of a British Evolutionist. Leiden: Brill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Litchfield, Henrietta. 1915. Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters, 1796–1896. 2 vols. London: John Murray.

  • Livingstone, David. 2014. Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Manier, Edward. 1978. The Young Darwin and His Cultural CircleA Study of Influences Which Helped Shape the Language and Logic of the First Drafts of the Theory of Natural Selection. Dordrecht: Reidel. (Repr. Springer 2008.)

    Google Scholar 

  • Mayor, Adrienne. 2008. Suppression of Indigenous Fossil Knowledge: From Claverack, New York, 1705 to Agate Springs, Nebraska, 2005. In Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, eds. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, 163–182. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mayr, Ernst. 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Milam, Erika L. 2010. Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moore, James R. 1982. Charles Darwin Lies in Westminster Abbey. In Charles Darwin: A Commemoration, ed. R. J. Berry, 97–113. London: Linnean Society of London. 

    Google Scholar 

  • Moore, James R. 1986. Socializing Darwinism: Historiography and the Fortunes of a Phrase, In Science as Politics, ed. L. Levidow, 38–80. (Radical Science Series no. 20.) London: Free Association Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moore, James R. 1989. Of Love and Death: Why Darwin “Gave Up Christianity.”. In History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, ed. James Moore, 195–229. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moore, James R. 1994. The Darwin Legend. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Numbers, Ronald L. 2006. The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oldroyd, D. R. 1984. How Did Darwin Arrive at His Theory? The Secondary Literature to 1982. History of Science 22: 325–374.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ospovat, Dov. 1981. The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838–1859. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paul, Diane B. 2003. Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics. In The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, eds. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, 214–239. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Pickering, G. W. 1974. Creative Malady: Illness in the Lives and Minds of Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter, Duncan. 1985. The Beagle Collector and His Collections. In The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn, 973–1019. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter, Theodore M. 1986. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Prodger, Phillip. 2009. Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Raverat, Gwen. 1952. Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood. London: Faber & Faber.

    Google Scholar 

  • Richards, Evelleen. 1983. Darwin and the Descent of Woman. In The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought, eds. David Oldroyd, and Ian Langham, 57–111. Boston: D. Reidel.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Richards, Evelleen. 2017. Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Richards, Robert J. 1992. The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Richards, Robert J. 2013. Was Hitler a Darwinian? Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Richmond, M. L. 2006. The Darwin Celebration of 1909: Reevaluating Evolution in the Light of Mendel, Mutation, and Meiosis. Isis 97: 447–484.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rudwick, M. J. S. 1974. Darwin and Glen Roy: A “Great Failure” in Scientific Method? Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 5: 97–185.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ruse, Michael. 1996. The Darwin Industry: A Guide. Victorian Studies 39 (2): 217–235.

    Google Scholar 

  • Russett, Cynthia Eagle. 1989. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schabas, Margaret. 1990. A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons and the Rise of Mathematical Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Schaffer, Simon, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds. 2009. The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schweber, S. S. 1978. The Young Darwin and His Cultural Circle: A Study of Influences Which Helped Shape the Language and Logic of the First Drafts of the Theory of Natural Selection. Journal of the History of Biology 12: 175–192.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Secord, James A. 1981. Nature’s Fancy: Charles Darwin and the Breeding of Pigeons. Isis 72: 163–186.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Secord, James A. 2000. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Sepkoski, David. 2008. Stephen Jay Gould, Darwinian Iconoclast? In Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology, eds. Oren Harman and Michael Dietrich, 321–337. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sera-Shriar, Efram. 2015. Anthropometric Portraiture and Victorian Anthropology: Situating Francis Galton’s Photographic Work in the Late 1870s. History of Science 53 (2): 155–179.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shapin, Steven. 2010. The Darwin Show. London Review of Books 32: 3–9.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sheldon, Myrna Perez. 2014. Claiming Darwin: Stephen Jay Gould in Contests Over Evolutionary Orthodoxy and Public Perception, 1977–2002. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45: 139–147.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shermer, M. 2002. In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Slotten, R. A. 2004. The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, C. H., and G. Beccaloni, eds. 2008. Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Jonathan. 2006. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smocovitis, Vassiliki Betty. 1999. The 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration in America. Osiris 14: 278–323.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smocovitis, Vassiliki Betty. 2005. “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over”: Rethinking the Darwinian Revolution. Journal of the History of Biology 38: 33–49.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stauffer, Robert C., ed. 1975. Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection: Being the Second Part of his Big Species Book Written From 1856 to 1858. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Sulloway, Frank. 1982. Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend. Journal of the History of Biology 15: 1–53.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Todes, Daniel P. 1989. Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Helvert, Paul, and John van Wyhe. 2021. Darwin: A Companion. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Van Wyhe, John. 2007. Mind the Gap: Did Darwin Avoid Publishing His Theory for Many Years? Notes and Records of the Royal Society 61: 177–205.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van Wyhe, John. 2012. Where Do Darwin’s Finches Come From? The Evolutionary Review 3 (1): 185–195.

    Google Scholar 

  • Voss, Julia. 2010. Darwin’s Pictures: Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837–1874. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weikart, R. 2006. From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Werth, Barry. 2009. Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America. New York: Random House.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hopwood, N. 2015. Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

  • Colp, Ralph. 2000. More on Darwin’s Illness. History of Science 38: 219–236.

  • Desmond, Adrian. 1989. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

  • Shapin, Steven, and Barry Barnes. 1979. Darwin and Social Darwinism: Purity and History. In Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, eds. B. Barnes and S. Shapin, 125–142. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Janet Browne.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Browne, J. Reflections on Darwin Historiography. J Hist Biol 55, 381–393 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-022-09686-5

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-022-09686-5

Keywords

Navigation