Criticism

Berry, Arthur. A Short History of Astronomy: From the Earliest Times Through the Nineteenth Century. New York: Dover Publications, 1961 (originally published in 1898), 440 p.

A broad overview of the history of astronomy from the Greeks through the nineteenth century, including biographical sketches.

Christianson, Gale E. The Wild Abyss: The Story of the Men Who Made Modern Astronomy. New York: The Free Press, 1978, 461 p.

Covers the major themes and historical figures in the history of astronomy against a broader background of social and cultural developments.

Hall, A. Rupert. From Galileo to Newton 1630-1720. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963, 380p.

Explains the transition of the early seventeenth century, especially outside of Italy, from the dominance of the geocentric theory of the cosmos to that of the heliocentric theory.

King, Henry C. The Background of Astronomy. London: Watts, 1911, 254p.

Outlines the history of astronomy from its obscure beginnings in the Near East to the close of the sixteenth century in Europe.

Park, David. The How and the Why: An Essay on the Origins and Development of Physical Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, 459 p.

Explains the difficulties for the seventeenth-century astronomers of deducing from limited observational data fundamental mathematical principles that explain the whole structure and motion of the solar system.

Rapport, Samuel and Helen Wright, eds. Astronomy. New York: New York University Press, 1964, 354 p.

A brief introduction to the field of astronomy.

Taton, Rend and Curtis Wilson, eds. Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Part A: Tycho Brae to Newton in The General History of Astronomy, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Deals with the history of the descriptive and theoretical astronomy of the solar system from the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth.

de Vaucouleirs, Gerard. Discovery of the Universe: An Outline of the History of Astronomy from the Origins to 1956. New York: Macmillan, 1957, 328 p.

Details the major developments in astronomy from antiquity to the immediate post-war era.