Lynn K. Nyhart, professor of Integrated Liberal Studies and History of Science, recently published a new book, “Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany,” from the University of Chicago Press.
Against the backdrop of the social upheavals of late 19th century, Nyhart charts the early history of the ideas that would grow into the scientific discipline of ecology – ideas about the nature of living communities, organisms' interactions with one another and with their environments – in their earlier incarnations in late 19th- and early 20th-century popular natural history in Germany, especially as it emerged in museums, zoos and schools.