Peter Ramberg of Truman State University introduced his paper, "Popularizing Astronomy in the German Free Religious Movement, 1850-1852." Abstract: Although historians have outlined the popular treatments of astronomy in the nineteenth century Britain by Mary Somerville, Richard Proctor and Agnes Clerke, the popular presentation of astronomy in nineteenth century Germany remains relatively unexplored. This essay examines articles on astronomy that appeared in Kirchliche Reform, a prominent journal of the German free religious movement of the 1840s and 1850s. This series of eight articles were written by the Halle schoolteacher H. Weißgerber between 1850 and 1852 and took their readers on a tour of the structure and origin of the solar system and the Milky Way. In all of his articles, Weißgerber took every opportunity to show how the results of modern astronomy made traditional religion obsolete.
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