Praise for the 4-volume collection: '… an unparalleled study of remarkable depth, detail and quality of a key development in our ideas about how the Earth functions … because Frankel draws on his extensive oral historical work with the key players in the development of plate tectonics, this is a study which can never be repeated in terms of its proximity to the events narrated, so many of those key players now being deceased.' Progress in Physical Geography
1. How the mobilism debate was structured; 2. Wegener and Taylor develop their theories of continental drift; 3. Sub-controversies in the drift debate, 1920s–50s; 4. The mechanism sub-controversy: 1921–51; 5. Arthur Holmes and his theory of substratum convection, 1915–55; 6. Regionalism and the reception of mobilism: South Africa, India and South America from the 1920s through the early 1950s; 7. Regional reception of mobilism in North America: 1920s through the 1950s; 8. Reception and development of mobilism in Europe: 1920s through the 1950s; 9. Fixism's popularity in Australia: 1920s to middle 1960s; Index.