This dissertation research project is a contribution to both the history of science and environmental history in that it seeks to analyze the dialectic between ocean exploration and conservation. It will examine the history of a number of popular oceanic naturalists in the twentieth-century by focusing on their in situ exploration of the oceanic frontier and the consequent narratives of exploration that circulated in popular culture. Exploration was a legitimate scientific practice in nineteenth-century America; it was bound up with the work of natural history whose primary goal was to map and catalogue the American landscape. But in twentieth-century universities, exploration was largely displaced by laboratory-based science, often under the aegis of philanthropic patronage. For the most part, the history of twentieth-century American science is about the dominance of the lab, the staggering explosion of technology, and the increasing bigness of science. This dissertation research project focuses on a handful of naturalists who directed their attention to a barely explored region- the ocean. Roy Chapman Andrews, Robert Cushman Murphy, William Beebe, Rachel Carson, Eugenie Clark, Thor Heyerdahl, and Jacques Cousteau were all naturalists, but also constructed popular representations of the ocean. One of the spin-offs of their exploratory efforts was their support for conservation measures.
