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"""Nall has written an important book, one that remaps the disciplinary landscape at a crucial period in the history of astronomy, moving us beyond over-simplified frameworks of popularization or anachronistic astronomical identities. . . . A refreshing and liberating take on a well-trodden subject. Highly recommended."" --Journal for the History of Astronomy ""Nall makes a compelling and deeply researched case . . . that historians of astronomy indeed need to be attentive to the entanglements of astronomy and media in the years between the 1860s and the 1920s. . . . News from Mars is, then, a major scholarly achievement, not just making better sense of supposedly well-trodden ground, but also pointing the way forward to different approaches to the history of modern astronomy."" --Physics in Perspective ""Controversies over the 'canals' some astronomers claimed to observe on Mars attracted huge public interest in the decades around 1900. Joshua Nall's detailed study reveals how these debates were made possible by changes in the relationship between observers and the public shaped by new means of communication including the telegraph and the expansion of popular journalism. He argues that science itself was transformed as much by the experts' efforts to communicate with the public as by the new equipment in their observatories. This is a study that will influence our understanding of a major episode in the history of science, but also our understanding of the nature of science itself."" --Peter Bowler, Queen's University Belfast ""Nall's nuanced account of how astronomers attempted to discredit and compete with Proctor and Lowell shows that the disciplinary norms of professional astronomy emerged during, not before, the canal controversy."" --Physics Today ""The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked, in many countries, by an insatiable appetite for news of the red planet. . . . Joshua Nall sets out to show us, in his impeccable book, how this vexing public fixation was a necessary and constitutive feature of 'proper' astronomy. . . . Nall's account is cautiously and carefully set out, and very much convincing: an exemplary piece of work in the Lightman and Secord mode."" --British Journal for the History of Science"

Controversies over the 'canals' some astronomers claimed to observe on Mars attracted huge public interest in the decades around 1900. Joshua Nall's detailed study reveals how these debates were made possible by changes in the relationship between observers and the public shaped by new means of communication including the telegraph and the expansion of popular journalism. He argues that science itself was transformed as much by the experts' efforts to communicate with the public as by the new equipment in their observatories. This is a study that will influence our understanding of a major episode in the history of science, but also our understanding of the nature of science itself. --Peter Bowler, Queen's University Belfast

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Joshua Nall is curator of modern sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, where he serves as chair

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