Darwin 2009: Bicentennial Events & Resources

Online Resources—General

Darwin: The Genius of Evolution from the BBC

Darwin Country from the Shrewsbury Museums Service

The Greater Boston Darwin Bicentennial at Boston University

International Darwin Day Celebrations (Various Locations)

Online Resources—Scholarly

The Darwin Correspondence Project

The Darwin Correspondence Project was founded in 1974 by an American scholar, Frederick Burkhardt, with the aid of Sydney Smith, a zoologist in the University of Cambridge (UK). They originally set out to locate, research, and publish summaries of, all letters written by Charles Darwin, the most celebrated naturalist of the nineteenth century (1809–82). Following a pilot project, it was decided to include letters written to Darwin also—an unusual step for a collection of correspondence at the time, and one now widely followed—and to publish complete transcripts in chronological order.

Darwin Online

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online (or “Darwin Online”), begun by John van Wyhe in 2002, assembles in one scholarly website all of Darwin’s published writings and unpublished papers. It does not cover his unpublished letters, which were already the focus of the Darwin Correspondence Project. Darwin Online materials appear courtesy of the University of Cambridge and the project is sponsored by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Landmarks & Exhibitions

Down House, the Home of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin: Voyages and Ideas That Shook the World at the British Museum

Multimedia

Audio: Darwin: The Genius of Evolution from BBC Radio 4

Audio: The “Darwin College” Lectures at the University of Cambridge

Video: “Darwin in Song” from the New York Times

Slideshow: Charles Darwin: A Life in Pictures at Darwin Online

Darwin Stamp Series from the Royal Mail

(From the Royal Mail: “To mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, we are issuing six special stamps, a Miniature Sheet of four additional stamps and a Prestige Stamp Book. We’ve created a radical ‘jigsaw’ design for each stamp to demonstrate how the various areas of Darwin’s studies—zoology, botany, geology, ornithology and anthropology—came together to inform his theory of Natural Selection.”)

In the Press

The New York Review of Books, May 28, 2009: “Why Darwin?” by Richard C. Lewontin

The New York Times, May 15, 2009: Essay: “Digging for Darwin,” by Peter Dizikes

The New York Times, April 17, 2009: “Darwin’s Descendant, on Origin of Poetry,” by Charles McGrath

The New York Times, February 9, 2009: “On Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’”

The Economist, February 5, 2009: “Charles Darwin: A Life in Poems”

The Economist, February 5, 2009: “Evolution: Unfinished Business”

New Scientist, February 4, 2009: “Darwin Anniversary Books: Pick of the Crop,” by Eleanor Harris

The Guardian, February 1, 2009: “Half of Britons Do Not Believe in Evolution, Survey Finds,” by Riazat Butt

The New York Times, January 29, 2009: “Charles Darwin, Abolitionist,” by Christopher Benfey

The New York Times, April 25, 2008: “What Darwin Saw Out Back,” by Cornelia Dean (with an audio slideshow, “Darwin’s Garden”)

The New York Times, December 24, 2008: “Four Stakes in the Heart of Intelligent Design,” by Charles McGrath

The Observer, June 21, 2008: “How Darwin Won the Evolution Race,” by Robin McKie

The New York Times, June 15, 2008: “Darwinists for Jesus,” by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

The New York Times, May 20, 2007: “My Dear Fellow Species,” by Mary Jo Murphy