Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea

The Victorian revival of the flat-earth idea was led by a dedicated group of campaigners who used the scriptures and science to underpin a radical challenge to the most fundamental facts. Their movement sparked a controversy that entangled men of science and astonished the general public with its unorthodox theories, public experiments, lawsuits, and even death threats. The story bears the hallmarks of a Victorian melodrama, but as Christine Garwood discovers, the campaign continued through the twentieth century, despite the Apollo missions and widely publicized pictures of the earth from space. Based on a range of original sources, Garwoods history of flat-earth beliefsfrom the Babylonians to the present dayraises issues central to the history and philosophy of science, its relationship with religion, and the making of human knowledge about the natural world. Flat Earth is the first definitive study of one of historys most notorious and persistent ideas, and evokes all the intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual turmoil of the modern age.