Böcker av John Wilson Foster

These essays play with the ironies and follies of the campaign for a unified Ireland that has expressed little insight or care about what's involved. How do we square the Irish in Britain with the anti-Britishness of the politicians and pundits in Ireland, or with the clamour for removal of Northern Ireland from the UK in which many Irish prosper?

In three contributions to the little-researched subject of the history of science in Ireland, John Wilson Foster looks at neglected episodes in Irish cultural history from mid-Victorian to Edwardian times. He discusses Darwinism in late 19th-century Ireland and its impact on Irish churchmen, with special reference to Darwin's champion John Tyndall, whose famous declaration of materialism in his Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Belfast 1874 provoked a vehement response from the leaders of the Protestant as well as Catholic churches. Foster then moves to the Belfast of 1911 and the building and launching of the Titanic, which he sees as the culmination of the engineering genius of Belfast from the mid-19th to early 20th century. In his third essay, Foster looks at the growing interest in Belfast towards the end of the 19th century in amateur scientific fieldwork (for example, botany), encouraged by the values and preoccupations on Victorian culture. The book is based on lectures delivered at NUI Maynooth in the National University of Ireland's Visiting Lectureship series.

The extraordinary story of abundance being hunted to extinction in a New World unused to ecological husbandry. An extinction which coincided with the outbreak of World War 1 - another example of mass destruction.