 During the 1950s, the modern renaissance in continuum mechanics was gathering momentum.It had started out in the 1940s as an interest in nonlinear elastic materials and non-Newtonian fluids, but quickly spread to envelop a much broader range of material behavior.Naghdi embraced the emerging theoretical developments and began to consider in a new light the mechanics that he had learned from classical authors such as Love, Lame, and Whittaker.