Contemporary scholarship concerning science diplomacy is increasingly taking a historical approach. In our introduction to this special issue, we argue that this approach promises insight into science diplomacy because of the tools historians of science bring to their work. In particular, we observe that not only are historians of science currently poised to chart the diplomatic aspects involved in the transnational circulation of technoscientific knowledge, materials, and expertise. They are ready to bring critical global analysis to an important phenomenon that (...) has too often been treated as a benign diplomacy device deployed by the Global North without equal reference to the Global South. Through cases discussed in the articles of the special issue, however, we see that historically, in the Global South as well as the Global North, science diplomacy has often functioned to mediate the circulation of technoscientific knowledge and materials, and its historical study helps to better illuminate the resulting knowledge-power nexus. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An overview of some of the main modes of making images of natural objects and processes, as they have appeared in the history of science, leads to two main conclusions. First, the dichotomies that have traditionally distinguished, for example, art from science, museums from laboratories, and geometrical from algebraic methods have produced a poverty of understanding of visualization. It is at the intersections of these dichotomies where much of the creative work of science occurs, and it is into those (...) intersections that this Focus section leads us. Second, the section suggests that we need to understand images as arguments. Generalizing, we need to develop a “materialized epistemology” that reunites sensual with ideational knowing. Recent work in the history of science is already pointing the way and producing a dramatically new historiography. (shrink)

British popular newspapers were fascinated by the terrible power of the nuclear bomb, and they devoted countless articles, editorials and cartoons to it. In so doing, they played a significant role in shaping the nuclear culture of the post-war period. Yet scholars have given little sustained attention to this rich seam of material. This article makes a contribution to remedying this major gap by offering an overview of the coverage of nuclear weaponry in the two most popular newspapers in Britain, (...) theDaily Expressand theDaily Mirror, in the period from 1945 to the early 1960s. Although both papers supported British possession of the bomb, claiming that it was essential for the maintenance of great-power status, their reporting was more complex and critical than the existing scholarship has tended to assume. This article argues that sceptical voices in the press often disrupted official narratives and that journalists emphasized the potential dangers involved in the nuclear arms race. Newspapers frequently highlighted, rather than downplayed, the horrors of the bomb: it was repeatedly portrayed as a ‘monster’ threatening the world. (shrink)

The development of photographic reproduction in the late nineteenth century permitted images in a range of visual media to be published in the press. Focusing on the popular scientific monthly Knowledge, this paper explores the evidentiary status of reproductions of astronomical photographs. After succeeding its founder Richard Anthony Proctor in 1889, the new editor of Knowledge, Arthur Cowper Ranyard, introduced high-quality collotype reproductions into each number of the magazine. One of Ranyard's main interests was the structure of the Milky Way, (...) evidence for which was only available through astronomical photographs. As Ranyard reproduced photographs in support of his arguments, he blurred the boundaries between the published collotype, the source negative and the astronomical phenomena themselves. Since each of these carried different evidentiary value, the confusion as to what, exactly, was under discussion did not go unremarked. While eminent astronomers disputed both Ranyard's arguments and the way in which they were presented, Knowledge disseminated both striking astronomical images and also a broader debate over how they should be interpreted. (shrink)