Iberian repertorios de los tiempos stemmed from Medieval almanacs and calendars. During the sixteenth century significant editorial, conceptual and material changes in repertorios incorporated astronomy, geography, chronology and natural philosophy. From De Li’s Repertorio (1492) to Zamorano’s Cronología (1585), the genre evolved from simple almanacs to more complex cosmological works which circulated throughout the Iberian-American world. This article claims that repertorios are a form of syncretic knowledge rather than “popular science” by relying on the concept of “knowledge in transit”. Elaborating (...) on this perspective, I present how repertorios ended up delivering a worldview from existing materials, a fact so far unnoticed by scholarship. At the same time, repertorios should not be considered an exclusively Iberian phenomenon, but the full scope of their nature as a form of syncretic knowledge should include their networks with migrants, indigenous, mestizos, and criollos across the Atlantic. In this sense, I try to trace the paths connecting productions in the Americas with Iberian repertorios. (shrink)

This article provides a transnational analysis of the campaigns for the organization of expeditions to the central Arctic region by the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the Prussian cartographer August Petermann between 1851 and 1853. By adopting a comparative approach, this study focuses on three interventions in the history of Arctic science and exploration: the construction of scientific expertise surrounding the relationship between the ‘armchair’ and the field, the role of transnational networks, and the significance of maps as travelling (...) epistemic objects in the production of knowledge about the Arctic regions. In bringing both campaigns in conversation with each other, this article demonstrates that the histories of Kane's and Petermann's campaigns did not constitute isolated episodes but form part of a transnational nexus of imperial science and Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century. Moreover, based on research in libraries and archives in the United States, Germany and England, this study reconnects otherwise siloed collections and contributes new findings on the interpersonal networks of science and exploration. Finally, this article illustrates the importance of adopting comparative transnational approaches for understanding the fluid and reciprocal nature of Arctic science throughout the transatlantic world. (shrink)

José Otero Espasandín (1900-1987) was an important science popularizer in Argentina during the 1940´s, who belonged to the Misiones Pedagógicas (Educational Missions) group in Spain. This paper presents his biography and his work as a science and technology popularizer. It focused on his features, value and significance for that period.

This paper traces the trade routes of South American fossil mammal bones in the 1830s, thus elaborating both local and intercontinental networks that ascribed new meanings to objects with little intrinsic value. It analyses the role of British consuls, natural-history dealers, administrative instructions and naturalists, who took the bones from the garbage pits of ranches outside Buenos Aires and delivered them into the hands of anatomists. For several years, the European debates on the anatomy ofMegatheriumwere shaped by the arrival in (...) London of a small living mammal and the ideas and evidence received from Montevideo on the existence of huge fossil bony armours. These debates culminated late in 1838 in the creation of the extinct genusGlyptodonby Richard Owen as a result of the exchange of letters, objects and depictions, and a series of contingent events. Based on primary sources and South American scholarship, this paper aims to contribute to the current debates among historians of science about the mobility of knowledge, as well as presenting the condition that made Charles Darwin's work possible. (shrink)

This essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of material culture. The essay argues that such practices were common in early (...) modern science, and informed experimental spaces and techniques and the ideas that they generated. The essay considers some of the varied motivations that led to such practices, and concludes by examining the endurance of recycling in science since the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in recent efforts to create sustainable scientific research practices. (shrink)

This paper uses the figure of the inbred laboratory mouse to reflect upon the management and mobilization of biological difference in the contemporary biosciences. Working through the concept of shifting experimental systems, the paper seeks to connect practices concerned with standardization and control in contemporary research with the emergent and stochastic qualities of biological life. Specifically, it reviews the importance of historical narratives of standardization in experimental systems based around model organisms, before identifying a tension in contemporary accounts of the (...) reproduction and differentiation of inbred mouse strains within them. Firstly, narratives of new strain development, foregrounding personal biography and chance discovery, attest to the contingency and situatedness of apparently universal biotechnological production. Secondly, discoveries of unexpected animal litters challenge efforts to standardize mouse phenotypes and control the reproduction of murine strains over space. The co-existence of these two narratives draws attention to the importance of and interplay between both chance and control, determination and emergence, and the making and moving of experimental life in biomedical research. The reception or denial of such biological excess reflects the distribution of agencies and the emerging spatialities of the global infrastructures of biotechnological development, with implications for future relations between animal lives and human becomings in experimental practices. (shrink)

This special issue re-evaluates the 1950s as a period of transnationalism in ideas and political practices, offering innovative insights into political history and political ideas. Without setting the national and transnational spheres against each other, the issue argues that the dialectics between the two was a defining element of Europe in this period. The articles explore transnational cooperation and exchanges among intellectuals, politicians and trade unionists, showing how they were changing in their interaction. The editorial sets out from the research (...) on the postwar configuration of Europe based on the retake of the nation state, combining it with new research of transnational history and putting out some methodological innovations. The editorial also highlights some significant themes across the articles: the central role of translation and localisation, the interaction with local interests and disputes, the Cold War, the acceleration of European integration, the rise of the Third World, the tensions between hope and fear or between nihilism and rebirth of Europe, the centrality of science. (shrink)

Summary This study offers a detailed analysis of an episode of the popularization of astronomy which took place in Portugal, a peripheral country of Europe, and occurring in the early twentieth century. The episode was driven by the 28 May 1900 total solar eclipse which was seen on the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain). Instead of focusing on one of the ends of the popularization process, we analyze the circulation of knowledge among scientists and the public, contrast the aims of (...) the various expeditions, professional and amateur, which took place on Portuguese soil, analyze their repercussions in the Portuguese astronomical landscape, and the different ways used by the Portuguese political elite and astronomical community to successfully appropriate this astronomical event to serve their varied agendas, political, social and scientific. In this episode of public enthusiasm for science, a central figure emerged in the network of the official commission, professional and amateur communities and the ‘general public’: Frederico Tomás Oom (1864–1930), an astronomer of the Lisbon Astronomical Observatory. This paper aims to illustrate the different layers of the circulation process, and at proving that the popularization of science was not a unidirectional process from scientists to lay people nor did it serve only a particular agenda, be it political, social or scientific. (shrink)

In May 1965, in the midst of Franco's dictatorship in Spain, four bottlenose dolphins travelled from Miami to Barcelona Zoo. These became the inhabitants of one of the first dolphinariums in Europe. The arrival of the dolphins was preceded by two trips of the zoo's director, accompanied by an architect and a politician, to visit the installations at the Miami Seaquarium, Sea World San Diego, and Marineland of the Pacific in California. In this paper, I reflect on how knowledge and (...) practices about a completely new animal and its keeping were acquired in the Barcelona Zoo. This was a time when exhibitions, popular perception, and scientific research regarding marine mammals were being developed. The training and exhibition of dolphins was shaped by a mixture of circus-like practices and scientific knowledge. Dolphins arrived in Europe with “knowledges” and practices attached, but also with a lot of uncertainty. However, circumstances like geography, logistics, and the corporate character of American aquaria prevented a straightforward flow of information from the United States to Europe. How did Barcelona Zoo keepers manage to gather information on the building and maintenance of a dolphinarium? And how did they gather information on how to feed, care, train, and exhibit the dolphins? This paper seeks to understand how the particular setting of Barcelona Zoo, as well as its social, scientific, and political context shaped the exhibition of and creation of knowledge about animals at the zoo. (shrink)

Anatomical exhibitions, online atlases and televised dissections have recently attracted much attention and raised questions concerning the status of and the authority over the human body, the purpose of anatomical education within and outside medical schools and the methods of teaching in the digital age. I propose that for understanding the current public views of anatomy, we need to gain insight into their historical development. This article focuses on anatomies accessible to non-medical audiences in the capital of the Habsburg Empire, (...) Vienna, at the time when the city was the seat of a world-leading medical school. Anatomy at the University of Vienna was famous for its research, instruction and the abundant provision with dissectible corpses. Public anatomies were equally rich and ranged from exhibitions at the Präuscher’s Panoptikon und Anatomisches Museum , established in 1871 in the Prater amusement park, lectures on human and comparative anatomy by the university professor Carl Bernhard Brühl (1863–1890), to displays of anatomical objects at the World Exhibition in 1873. I finish by discussing a collection of letters written by the prospective ‘cadaver donors’, offering an insight into the ways in which medical encounters and anatomical knowledge informed the working-class views of their bodies. By looking at the kinds of anatomy in circulation, as well as at the participants in these exchanges, I want to illuminate the relationship between academic and public anatomies, as well as to reveal the purposes to which public anatomy served. (shrink)

This essay adopts a semiotic perspective focused on practices of communication, movement, and translation to examine the global impact of A. J. Greimas and his oeuvre. The linguist and semiotician’s lecture trips abroad, the number and provenance of international students in his Paris seminar, and the chronology and linguistic geography of translations of his work help describe, gauge, and explain the dissemination and development of his ideas throughout the world. His project has engendered distinctive appropriations and at times productive institutional (...) structures in a number of cultural and linguistic contexts, notably Romance, Anglo-American, Germanic, Russian, Lithuanian, and Chinese. The broader historical relations between France and other lands, and the extent of each society’s use of the French language have conditioned, fostered, or impeded responses to his proposals. The conclusion’s discussion of the relative importance of personal contacts, socio-historical context, and the sociolinguistic and pedagogical status of French for his international reception aims to contribute to general methodological debates in the history of science and ideas and in transnational history. (shrink)

One of France's colonial enterprises in the eighteenth century was to acclimatize nutmeg, native to the Maluku islands, in the French colony of Isle de France (today's Mauritius). Exploring the acclimatization of nutmeg as a practice, this paper reveals the practical challenges of transferring knowledge between Indo-Pacific islands in the second half of the eighteenth century. This essay will look at the process through which knowledge was created – including ruptures and fractures – as opposed to looking at the mere (...) circulation of knowledge. I argue that nutmeg cultivation on Isle de France was a complex process of creolizing expertise originating from the local populations of the plants’ native islands with the horticultural knowledge of colonists, settlers, labourers and slaves living on Isle de France. In this respect, creolization describes a process of knowledge production rather than a form of knowledge. Once on Isle de France, nutmeg took root in climate and soil conditions which were different from those of its native South East Asian islands. It was cultivated by slaves and colonists who lacked prior experience with the cultivation of this particular spice. Experienced horticulturalists experimented with their own traditions. While they relied on old assumptions, they also came to question them. By examining cultivation as an applied practice, this paper argues that the creolization of knowledge was a critical aspect in French colonial botany. (shrink)

Italian mycologist Pier Andrea Saccardo is best remembered for his monumental Sylloge Fungorum, the first ‘modern’ effort to compile all identified fungi within a single classification scheme. The existing history of mycology is limited and has primarily focused on developments within England, but this article argues that Saccardo and his collaborators on the Sylloge supported a vital transnational expansion of mycological knowledge exchange and played a crucial role in stabilizing the tangled knot of local naming and identification among the world's (...) amateur and professional mycologists. Written in the ‘universal’ scientific language of Latin, the Sylloge served as an early database of fungal knowledge and symbolized a broader unification of mycological inquiry in a moment of expanded scientific correspondence. The article situates this proto-database in broader histories of big data in biology and shows how the Sylloge formed a globalizing foundation for the twentieth century's major collecting and taxonomic advances in mycology. (shrink)

Aborder l’histoire des mathématiques et son enseignement à travers les institutions scientifiques est une démarche dorénavant courante et souvent pertinente. De nombreux travaux l’ont montré en particulier dans le cadre des grandes institutions scientifiques militaires comme l’École polytechnique [Belhoste 1994], [Bret 2002]. L’histoire de l’enseignement et de la diffusion des sciences, en particulier des mathématiques, a été renouvelée depuis une vingtaine d’années tant en France que dans d’...

This article explores the networking activities of Count Nikolai Rumiantsev and Adam von Krusenstern, his close collaborator. The visionary Russian statesman and the celebrated navigator were deeply involved in northern exploration. They funded and organized a circumnavigating voyage by the brigRurikin 1815–18, with the explicit goals of searching for a northern passage between Eurasia and North America and conducting a series of scientific investigations in the Bering Strait region. This private exploratory enterprise profoundly influenced the exchange of information and reconfigured (...) both local and global networks of knowledge. Based on an analysis of private correspondence, printed accounts and journal articles related to theRurik's expedition, this study sheds light on how this transnational network of actors emerged and functioned, and how it promoted a lively circulation of information about exploration in the Bering Strait region in the 1810s–1820s. I argue that a complex interplay of geopolitical and intellectual competition, with exchanges, collaborations and coordination among various actors (e.g. patrons, navigators, scholars, entrepreneurs and publishers), stimulated further research on the global ocean's northern spaces and laid the foundations of marine science. (shrink)

ArgumentNineteenth-century Prussia was deeply entrenched in philhellenism, which affected the ideological framework of its public institutions. At Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, philhellenism provided the rationale for a persistent elevation of the humanities over the burgeoning experimental life sciences. Despite this outspoken hierarchy, professor of physiology Emil du Bois-Reymond eventually managed to increase the prestige of his discipline considerably. We argue that du Bois-Reymond’s use of philhellenic repertoires in his expositions on physiology for the educated German public contributed to the rise (...) of physiology as a renowned scientific discipline. Du Bois-Reymond’s rhetorical strategies helped to disassociate experimental physiology from clinical medicine, legitimize experimental practices, and associate the emerging discipline with the more esteemed humanities and theoretical sciences. His appropriation of philhellenic rhetoric thus spurred the late nineteenth-century change in disciplinary hierarchies and helped to pave the way for the current hegemonic position of the life sciences. (shrink)

The paper discusses the publications of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (RSAS) as part of a wider network of publication exchange, linking learned societies, libraries, and archives. The periodicals of the RSAS went through several reorganisations between 1813 and 1903, all to some extent related to their role in publication exchange. Although subject to many of the same deliberations of commercial value and institutional prestige as the expanding book trade, publication exchange offered a means of communication for institutions with (...) widely differing financial, linguistic and scientific status, and a forum for articulating a wide range of values significant in scientific publication. In the context of publication exchange, the roles of producers and consumers, and of publishers and repositories of scientific knowledge overlap, and librarians emerge alongside editors as central actors in scientific communication. Scientific editorship should be viewed not only as a means of disseminating scientific findings to wider audiences, but as designing a product that could be used to forge institutional connections, to acquire publications, and to build collections. The case of the RSAS periodicals highlights the importance of publication, not only for the distribution of scientific knowledge, but for its acquisition. (shrink)

After WWII, global concerns about the uses of nuclear energy and radiation sources in agriculture, medicine, and industry brought about calls for radiation protection. At the beginning of the 1960s radiation protection involved the identification and measurement of all sources of radiation to which a population was exposed, and the evaluation and assessment of populations in terms of the biological hazard their exposure posed. Mexico was not an exception to this international trend. This paper goes back to the origins of (...) the first studies on the effects of radiation and on radioprotective compounds in the Genetics and Radiobiology Program of the National Commission of Nuclear Energy founded in 1960, at a time when the effects of radiation on living beings and radiation protection demanded the attention of highly localized groups of scientists and the creation of international as well as national institutions, and its connection to dosimetry and radiation protection until the 1990s. This historical reconstruction examines the circulation of knowledge, scientists, and their material and cognitive resources, to show that radiobiology, with dosimetry and radiation protection as cases in point, not only were carried out with high international standards in parallel with international agencies, but also reflected local material needs, including the standardization of new experimental techniques. (shrink)

John Forrester’s book Thinking in Cases does not provide one ultimate definition of what it means to ‘think in cases’, but rather several alternatives: a ‘style of reasoning’ (Hacking), ‘paradigms’ or ‘exemplars’ (Kuhn), and ‘language games’ (Wittgenstein), to mention only a few. But for Forrester, the stories behind each of the figures who suggested these different models for thinking (in cases) are as important as the models themselves. In other words, the question for Forrester is not only what ‘thinking in (...) cases’ is, but also who might be considered a ‘thinker in cases’. Who could serve as a case study for such a thinker? The major candidates that Forrester considers in his book to be ‘thinkers in cases’ are Kuhn, Foucault, Freud, and Winnicott. In what follows, I will argue that one name is missing from this list, as well as from Forrester’s book more generally: Michael Balint. This name is missing not only because Balint was a great ‘thinker in cases’, but also because we have some reasons to believe that Forrester himself thought so and wished to add him to the list. Forrester, I will argue, found in Balint an exemplar for a thinker in cases that combined elements from Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory and Foucault’s philosophy of the case-based sciences. (shrink)

This essay examines the physicist Ernst Mach’s popular work. Like many other scientists in late nineteenth-century Central Europe, he viewed the popular genre as a means not only of edifying the lay public but of communicating arguments to other specialists. In many cases, he used his popularizations to draw his colleagues’ attention to the biological and evolutionary features of scientific reasoning, although his own understanding of those features changed in the 1880s and early 1890s. Notably, he came to believe that (...) human beings instinctively read substances into nature. Several years after adopting this new perspective on substance, he incorporated it into a series of popular works that were intended to outline his views on thermodynamics in general and to weigh in on the controversy over “energetics” that erupted at the 1895 Versammlung Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärtze. (shrink)

What Is Race? Evidence from Scientists is a picture book for schoolchildren published by UNESCO as part of its high-profile campaign on race. The 87-page, oblong, soft-cover booklet contains bold, semi-abstract, pared-down images accompanied by text, devised to make scientific concepts ‘more easily intelligible to the layman’. Produced by UNESCO’s Department of Mass Communication, the picture book represents the organization’s early-postwar confidence in the power of scientific knowledge as a social remedy and diplomatic tool. In keeping with a significant component (...) of the race campaign, What Is Race? presented genetics as the route to an enlightened, scientific, non-prejudiced understanding of race. This article seeks to explain the book’s management, aesthetics and framing in the context of postwar disciplinary and international politics. Viewing UNESCO’s race campaign as a high point for an internationalist ideology of mass education, this article also analyses the visual and literary arguments of What Is Race? and proposes that the enduring image of genetics as technical and neutral knowledge was in part shaped by UNESCO’s efforts to communicate scientific authority to an apparently ‘popular’ audience. (shrink)

The _why_ and the _how_ of knowledge production are examined in the case of the transnational cooperation between the directors of observatories in the Far East who drew up unified typhoon-warning codes in the period 1900–1939. The _why_ is prompted by the socioeconomic interests of the local chambers of commerce and international telegraphic companies, although this urge has the favourable wind of Far Eastern meteorologists’ ideology of voluntarist internationalism. The _how_ entails the persistent pursuit of consensus (on ends rather than (...) means) in international meetings where non-binding resolutions on codes and procedures are adopted. The outcome is the co-production of standardised knowledge, that is, the development of a series of processes and practices that co-produce both knowledge and ideas about the social order in a force field characterised by negotiations and power struggles. (shrink)

An unpublished satirical work, writtenc.1848–1854, provides fresh insight into the most famous scientific voyage of the nineteenth century. John Clunies Ross, settler of Cocos-Keeling – which HMSBeaglevisited in April 1836 – felt that Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin had ‘depreciated’ the atoll on which he and his family had settled a decade earlier. Producing a mock ‘supplement’ to a new edition of FitzRoy'sNarrative, Ross criticized their science and their casual appropriation of local knowledge. Ross's virtually unknown work is intriguing not (...) only for its glimpse of theBeaglevoyage, but also as a self-portrait of an imperial scientific reader. An experienced merchant seaman and trader–entrepreneur with decades of experience in the region, Ross had a very different perspective from that of FitzRoy or Darwin. Yet he shared many of their assumptions about the importance of natural knowledge, embracing it as part of his own imperial projects. Showing the global reach of print culture, he used editing and revision as satirical weapons, insisting on his right to participate as both reader and author in scientific debate. (shrink)

In recent years, historians have debated the prospect of offering new ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ perspectives in their studies. This paper introduces the reader to this special issue by analysing characteristics, merits and flaws of these approaches. It then considers how historians of science have practised transnational history without, however, paying sufficient attention to the theoretical foundations of this approach. Its final part illustrates what benefits may derive from the application of transnational history in the field. In particular, we suggest looking (...) at the construction of transnational networks in science, and discuss some of the methodological consequences of adopting this approach. (shrink)

General notions of the biosphere are widely recognized and form important elements of contemporary debate concerning global environmental change, helping to focus attention on the complex interactions that characterize the Earth's natural systems. At the same time, there is continued uncertainty over the precise definition of the concept allied to a relatively limited critique of its early development, which was linked closely to advances in the natural sciences during the late nineteenth century and particularly, it is argued here, to the (...) emergence of biogeochemistry. In the light of this, the principal aim of the paper is to explore the development and subsequent dissemination of biogeochemical renderings of the biosphere concept, focusing primarily on the work of the Russian biogeochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadskii (1863–1945). The paper identifies four key moments which, it is argued, help to explain the development and subsequent dissemination of a biogeochemical understanding of the biosphere. First, we draw attention to the particularities of St Petersburg's natural-science community during the late nineteenth century, arguing that this was instrumental in providing the basis for Vernadskii's future work related to the biosphere. Second, we consider the ways in which Vernadskii's ideas concerning the biosphere were able to move to the West during the first half of the twentieth century with specific reference to his links with the French scientists Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Edouard Le Roy, and the US-based ecologist George Evelyn Hutchinson. Third, we reflect more purposefully on matters of reception and, in particular, the emergence of a set of circumstances within Western ecological science after 1945, which encouraged a positive engagement with biogeochemical understandings of the biosphere. Finally, we examine the 1968 UNESCO-sponsored Biosphere Conference, which represented the first time the biosphere concept was employed at the international level. Furthermore, this event was in many ways a high point for a specifically biogeochemical approach, with the subsequent popularization of the biosphere concept during the course of the 1970s helping to broaden the discourse markedly. (shrink)

This article argues that the study of astronomical observing instruments, their transportation around the globe and the personal and professional networks created by such exchanges are useful conceptual tools in exploring the role of science in the nineteenth-century British Empire. The shipping of scientific instruments highlights the physical and material connections that bound the empire together. Large, heavy and fragile objects, such as transit circles, were difficult to transport and repair. As such, the logistical difficulties associated with their movement illustrate (...) the limitations of colonial scientific enterprises and their reliance on European centres. The discussion also examines the impact of the circulation of such objects on observatories and astronomers working in southern Africa, India and St Helena by tracing the connections between these places and British scientific institutions, London-based instrument-makers, and staff at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. It explores the ways in which astronomy generally, and the use of observing instruments in particular, relate to broader themes about the applications of science, the development of colonial identities, and the consolidation of empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. In considering these issues, the article illustrates the symbiotic relationship between science and empire in the period, demonstrating the overlap between political and strategic considerations and purely scientific endeavours. Almost paradoxically, as they trained their sights and their telescopes on the heavens, astronomers and observers helped to draw diverse regions of the earth beneath closer together. By tracing the movement of instruments and the arcs of patronage, cooperation and power that these trajectories inscribe, the role of science and scientific objects in forging global links and influencing the dynamics of the nineteenth-century British Empire is brought into greater focus. (shrink)

From the Victorian era to our own, critics of Herbert Spencer have portrayed his science‐based philosophical system as irrelevant to the concerns of practicing scientists. Yet, as a number of scholars have recently argued, an extraordinary range of reformist and experimental projects across the human and life sciences took their bearings from Spencer's work. This essay examines Spencerian science as practiced by the biologist, sociologist, and town planner Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). Through a close examination of his experimental natural history of (...) the late 1870s and early 1880s, his wider writings on the evolutionary process in the 1880s, and his efforts later in that decade to improve the slums of Edinburgh, this essay reveals Geddes's deep, unifying, and energizing commitment to Spencer's program. Recapturing that commitment can not only help historians rethink Spencerian science as practice but also suggest ways of overcoming the dichotomy between elite ideas and practical activity that bedevils much contemporary historiography of science. (shrink)

This paper examines the fortunes of the controversial use of hypnosis to ‘enhance’ autobiographical memories in postwar America. From the 1950s through the early 1980s, hypnosis became increasingly popular as a means to exhume information thought to be buried within the mind. This practice was encouraged by lay understandings of memory drawn from a material culture full of new recording devices ; and during the years when the practice was becoming most popular and accepted, academic psychologists developed a contrary, reconstructive, (...) account of memory that was put to use in a series of battles meant to put an end to hypnotic recall. But popular commitment to the idea of permanent memory ‘recordings’ sustained the practice and the assumptions about memory and self that were associated with it, and in the face of a culture of academic psychology fully committed to the idea of ‘reconstructive’, malleable memory, a tidal wave of ‘enhanced’ memories swept America in the late 1980s and 1990s, in the so-called ‘memory wars’. These, in turn, provoked academic psychologists to research the claims and counter claims central to the memory wars. The paper will also make an argument about the importance of lay knowledge in the psychological sciences explored in this paper: that popular psychological beliefs played a significant, even formative role in defining the nature of forensic psychological expertise, and also the framing of elite academic psychological research. (shrink)

Between 1820 and 1850, the Dutch government sent several scientists to the Netherlands Indies as part of the Natuurkundige Commissie (Natural History Committee). One of these was naturalist Eltio Alegondus Forsten (1811–1843), who was sent on a collecting mission to Celebes (Sulawesi). This paper explores the ways in which Forsten was in a relationship of mutual interdependence with four spheres of influence, two in the Netherlands (those of the Dutch government and the natural history museum in Leiden) and two in (...) the Dutch East Indies (those of the governor-general and the local population of Forsten's collecting grounds). These four entities served as focal points for Forsten's practice, and tried to use his mission for their own purposes. At the same time, Forsten negotiated their demands deftly and turned them to his own advantage in order to serve his own future career. Throughout, I draw parallels with the experiences of various other members of the Natural History Committee. I ultimately propose that this case study of Forsten provides a glimpse of a possible pattern for the relationship between government-sponsored science and empire in the Dutch East Indies in the first half of the 19th century. (shrink)

This article investigates the contribution made by indigenous employees to the work of the Hong Kong Observatory from its inception and into the early twentieth century. As has so often been the case in Western histories of science, the significance of indigenous workers and of women in the Hong Kong Observatory has been obscured by the stories of the government officials and observatory director(s). Yet without the employees, the service could not have functioned or grown. While the glimpses of their (...) work and lives are fleeting, often only revealed in minor archival references, this article seeks to interrogate these sources to make these workers’ lives visible and to offer an examination of everyday working relationships at this place and point in time. It focuses on three areas. First, an exploration of who these workers were, and the role they played at the observatory. Second, an investigation of their contribution to the nascent science of meteorology. Third, an examination of available evidence – levels of high staff turnover, complaints, instances of foot dragging, or working to rule, as well as the tenacity to continue for years under difficult working conditions – to demonstrate the ability of workers to reject or to negotiate with colonial/patriarchal authority. In profiling their stories, this article will add to the literature examining the lives of scientific workers and their contributions to science, the everyday cultural and social contexts of colonial meteorology, and the role of ordinary men and women in producing meteorological knowledge at this time. (shrink)

This article seeks to illuminate the shifting and unstable configuration of scientific print culture around 1800 through a close focus on William Nicholson's Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, generally known as Nicholson's Journal. Viewing Nicholson as a mediator between the two spheres of British commercial journalism and scientific enquiry, I investigate the ways he adapted practices and conventions from the domain of general-readership monthly periodicals for his Journal, forging a virtual community of scientific knowledge exchange in print. (...) However, in pursing this project Nicholson ran up against disreputable associations connected with the politics of journalism and came into conflict with more established models of scientific publication. To illustrate this, I turn to examine in detail the practice of reprinting, a technique of information transmission which the Journal adapted from general periodicals and newspapers, looking at a clash between Nicholson and the Royal Society that exposes disagreements over the appropriate role for journals during this period of reorganization in the scientific world. (shrink)

The essays in this special issue of Centaurus examine overlooked agents and sites of knowledge production beyond the academy and venues of industry- and government-sponsored research. By using gender as a category of analysis, they uncover scientific practices taking place in locations such as the kitchen, the nursery, and the storefront. Because of historical gendered patterns of exclusion and culturally derived sensibilities, the authors in this volume find that significant contributions to science were made in unexpected places and that these (...) were often made by women. The shift in focus to these different sites and different actors broadens the spectrum of what counts as science and where science happens. That is, in moving beyond the parameters of formal academic structures, this special issue seeks to recast the ways in which the production of science itself is defined and to engage readers in the redesign of the boundaries of our discipline. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an explication of the notion of local explanation. In the literature, local explanations are considered as metaphysically and methodologically satisfactory: local explanations reveal the contingency of science and provide a methodologically sound historiography of science. However, the lack of explication of the notion of local explanation makes these claims difficult to assess. The explication provided in this paper connects the degree of locality of an explanans to the degree of contingency of the explanandum. Moreover, the (...) explication is shown to be compatible with the methodological need for a general consideration in the historiography of science. In this way, the explication satisfies the need to explicate an important notion, connects local explanations and contingency, and enables us to see how local explanations and general considerations can be connected. However, the explication also sheds critical light on many claims and expectations that are associated with local explanations and their satisfactoriness. (shrink)

Science in film, and usual equivalents such asscience on filmorscience on screen, refer to the cinematographic representation, staging, and enactment of actors, information, and processes involved in any aspect or dimension of science and its history. Of course, boundaries are blurry, and films shot as research tools or documentation also display science on screen. Nonetheless, they generally count asscientific film, andscience inandon filmorscreentend to designate productions whose purpose is entertainment and education. Moreover, these two purposes are often combined, and inherently (...) concern empirical, methodological, and conceptual challenges associated withpopularization,science communication, and thepublic understanding of science. It is in these areas that the notion of thedeficit modelemerged to designate a point of view and a mode of understanding, as well as a set of practical and theoretical problems about the relationship between science and the public. (shrink)

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical (...) icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations. (shrink)