This article explores the production and consumption of phrenological knowledge for and by middle-class women in the USA during the early and middle decades of the 19th century. At a time when science itself had few boundaries, women became readers, consumers, proselytizers and practitioners of this knowledge system, outside of a scientific academy. This paper argues that phrenological beliefs about sex differences enabled and encouraged women to be users. Phrenology allowed women to negotiate gender and by encouraging followers to ‘know (...) thyself,’ phrenology blurred the lines of expertise, creating a fluid interplay between users and producers of knowledge. This article then shows how categories of women users–practitioners, consumers and feminists–implemented or rejected elements of phrenology as they sought to affirm or amend prescribed gender roles. As the industrial economy seemed to divide public and private, production and consumption, masculine and feminine, phrenology allowed women and men to stand within and between these binaries. At the same time, some women used phrenology to classify themselves and others in a socio-natural hierarchy and further engrained scientific racism in American culture. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The contribution of amateur scientists to the International Geophysical Year (IGY) was substantial, especially in the arena of spotting artificial satellites. This article examines how Fred L. Whipple and his colleagues recruited satellite spotters for Moonwatch, a program for amateur scientists initiated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in 1956. At the same time, however, the administrators with responsibility for the IGY program closely monitored and managed—sometimes even contested—amateur participation. IGY programs like Moonwatch provided valuable scientific information and gave (...) amateurs opportunities to contribute actively to the research of professional scientists. Moonwatch, which operated until 1975, eventually became the public face of a vast satellite‐tracking network that expanded the SAO’s global reach and helped further Whipple’s professional goals. Understanding amateurs’ interactions with the professional science community enables us better to understand the IGY as a phenomenon that enlisted broad participation and transcended traditional boundaries between professional and amateur scientists. (shrink)

The post-Civil War American natural history craze spawned a new institution -- the natural history dealer -- that has failed to receive the historical attention it deserves. The individuals who created these enterprises simultaneously helped to promote and hoped to profit from the burgeoning interest in both scientific and popular specimen collecting. At a time when other employment and educational prospects in natural history were severely limited, hundreds of dealers across the nation provided encouragement, specimens, publication outlets, training opportunities, and (...) jobs for naturalists of all motivations and levels of expertise. This paper explores the crucial role that specimen dealers played in the larger natural history community. After briefly examining the development of local taxidermy shops in the mid-nineteenth century, it then traces the history of four large natural history dealerships established in the United States during the latter half of the century: Ward's Natural History Establishment, Frank Blake Webster's Naturalists' Supply Depot, Southwick & Jencks' Natural History Store, and Frank H. Lattin & Co. By the early twentieth century, changing tastes in interior design, the growth of the Audubon movement, and the dramatic expansion of alternate training and job opportunities for naturalists led many specimen dealers either to shift their emphasis or to shut their doors. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay presents a historical epistemology of the nineteenth‐century controversy concerning a scientific hoax, the Cardiff giant. My focus is on the shifting meanings given to the giant, which were based on epistemologies derived from scientific authority, religious belief, and market relations. In 1869 a farmer in Cardiff, New York, claimed to have discovered the fossilized remains of a prehistoric, perhaps biblical, giant on his property. While some scientists stressed the need to cooperate with commercial showmen, enthusiasm for the (...) giant incited the ire of others, who sought to debunk it and the culture that sustained it. Drawing on local newspaper reports, memoirs, nineteenth‐century exposés, and publicity materials associated with the giant’s display, I link the episode to the history of popular and scientific observation. The giant was a particularly troubling spectacle because as an object of inquiry it blurred the modern boundaries separating nature, society, and religion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Even as the division between professional scientists and laypeople became sharper by the end of the nineteenth century, the collaboration of local people remained important in scientific fieldwork, especially in sciences such as vertebrate paleontology that required long‐term extractive access to research sites. In the North American West, the competition between museums and universities for the best fossil quarry sites involved negotiations with locals. The conflict over differing conceptions of the field site is vividly demonstrated through an examination of (...) one site on the High Plains of western Nebraska in the early twentieth century. This case offers a rare opportunity to see not only how professionals regarded such sites but also how the resident ranching family, the Cooks, attempted to exercise leverage over the scientific fieldwork that took place there. While the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh became mired in protracted conflict with the Cooks over discovery claims and the ongoing control of the site, the University of Nebraska and the American Museum of New York developed more harmonious relations with the site's resident ranching family. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn the nineteenth century, American legal educators drew on the idea of “legal science” the claim that the study of law was similar to the study of the natural sciences. In this paper, I propose to examine the particular conceptions of “science” that were incorporated into that idea. The primary point of the paper is to argue that in antebellum America, a particular view of the natural sciences dominated public discourse, and it was this conception that was appropriated by (...) contemporaneous legal scientists. Public discussions of natural science in lyceums, surveys, and journals, were carried out in a language grounded in the same religious commitments and the same normative conception of nature that drove the ideology of laissez-faire. Described under the rubric “Protestant Baconianism,” the approach was characterized by commitments to four elements: natural theology; a constrained version of Baconian inductivism; a belief in grand synthesis and proof by analogy; and claims of moral improvement. These elements were typical of the efforts of a particular influential circle of natural scientists and, similarly, of some of the more influential legal scientists in the antebellum period. This article examines the elements of the Protestant Baconian approach that were incorporated into Christopher Columbus Langdell's model of legal science in the 1870s, a model that continues to influence thinking about both legal education and jurisprudence to this day. (shrink)

Recent historiography has demonstrated a growing sensitivity toward space as a geographical and cultural category. The following article expands on this theme by focusing on Alexander von Humboldt and his understanding of nature as >cosmos Humboldtian science Humboldtian science Humboldtian science< not only to satisfy the need for knowledge; beyond that, Humboldt's ideas nourished an esthetic perception of nature, and they served as a vehicle for the ideological search for unity in nature and human society.