The history of our scientific understanding (before spacecraft started taking photographs of the Martian surface) involves a number of interesting characters. I explored this history in the following articles:
And see the following: An Observational History of Mars.
I conducted a project to document of the history of the observatories at the University of Michigan. The following is the result of that project: The History of the University of Michigan Observatories.
The following article describes a presentation by Owen Gingerich (Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and History of Science, Harvard) which was entitled “Four Myths of the Copernican Revolution.”