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The ‘Courant Hilton’: building the mathematical sciences at New York University The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Brit Shields
This essay explores how mid-twentieth-century mathematicians at New York University envisioned their discipline, cultural identities and social roles, and how these self-constructed identities materialized in the planning of their new academic building, Warren Weaver Hall. These mathematicians considered their research to be a ‘living part of the stream of science’, requiring a mathematics research
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Petty's instruments: the Down Survey, territorial natural history and the birth of statistics The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Svit Komel
William Petty's work has usually been regarded as an epistemic break in the history of statistical and politico-economic thought. In this paper, I argue that Petty's statistical notions stemmed from the natural-historical techniques he originally implemented to manage the Down Survey. Following Bacon, who viewed the description of trades as a paramount branch of natural history, Petty approached the
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‘The very term mensuration sounds engineer-like’: measurement and engineering authority in nineteenth-century river management The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Rachel Dishington
Measurement was vital to nineteenth-century engineering. Focusing on the work of the Stevenson engineering firm in Scotland, this paper explores the processes by which engineers made their measurements credible and explains how measurement, as both a product and a practice, informed engineering decisions and supported claims to engineering authority. By examining attempts made to quantify, measure
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The end of an era The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Peter J. Bowler
These volumes conclude a series initiated in 1974, marking almost fifty years of effort by a huge cohort of scholars. This review is thus a valedictory for the whole series as well as an account of what we have learned from the most recent volumes about Darwin's final years (1879–82). The project was begun by Frederick Burckhardt, who shared the editorial role for the early volumes with Sydney Smith
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Scientizing the ‘environment’: Solly Zuckerman and the idea of the School of Environmental Sciences The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-12-27 Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda
In 1960 Sir Solly Zuckerman proposed the idea of an interdisciplinary department of ‘environmental sciences’ (ENV) for the newly established University of East Anglia (UEA). Prior to this point, the concept of ‘environmental sciences’ was little known: since then, departments and degree courses have rapidly proliferated through universities and colleges around the globe. This paper draws on archival
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A forerunner of Darwin in the service of nihilists: the translation and reception of Vestiges in Russia The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Alexander V. Khramov
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers, a Scottish publisher and popular writer, was one of the most influential evolutionary works in the pre-Darwinian age. This article examines the circumstances in which this treatise was published in Russia in 1863 and went through a second printing in 1868. Vestiges was translated into Russian by Alexander Palkhovsky (1831–1907), a former
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‘The goddess that we serve’: projecting international community at the first serial chemistry conferences, 1893–1914 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Geert Somsen
The emergence of conferences in the late nineteenth century significantly changed the ways in which the international scientific community functioned and experienced itself. In the early modern Republic of Letters, savants mainly related through print and correspondence, and apart from at local and later national levels, scholars rarely met. International conferences, by contrast, brought scientists
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Sex, science and curated community at the World League for Sexual Reform 1929 conference The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Laura C. Forster
This article interrogates the scientific conference as a means by which the organizers of the World League for Sexual Reform's 1929 conference attempted to marshal the ‘scientific spirit’ in order to present progressive sexual reform as a rational and scientifically informed undertaking. The conference was carefully curated to make the sex reform movement (and the assorted characters that gathered
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The art of gathering: histories of international scientific conferences The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-10-30 Charlotte Bigg, Jessica Reinisch, Geert Somsen, Sven Widmalm
Hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century, yet the history of science has often treated them as stages for scientific practice, not as the play itself. Drawing on recent work in the history of science and of international relations, the introduction to this special issue suggests avenues for exploring the phenomenon of the international
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The Pugwash scientists’ conferences, Cyrus Eaton and the clash of internationalisms, 1954–1961 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Waqar H. Zaidi
This paper examines the contest between Canadian American industrialist Cyrus Eaton and the Pugwash scientists’ leadership for influence over the early Pugwash scientists’ conferences. Eaton's activism has generally been dismissed in the historical literature as ineffective, naive and too uncritical of the Soviet Union. This paper argues that he was genuinely committed to international peace and security
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‘Super Bowl of the world conference circuit’? A network approach to high-level science and policy conferencing The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Sven Widmalm
Elite conferences, such as the Nobel Symposia organized by the Nobel Foundation since 1965, have often put a premium on the uninhibited exchange of ideas rather than the broad exchange of information. Nobel Symposium 14, The Place of Value in a World of Fact (1969), combined this ethos with the ambition to engage with ‘world problems’ that were thought by many at the time to constitute a global crisis
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Functional informality: crafting social interaction toward scientific productivity at the Gordon Research Conferences, 1950–1980 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Georgiana Kotsou
In the early and mid-twentieth century, scientific conferences were a popular tool to establish communication between scientists. Organisational efforts, research and funds were spent defining what makes a productive and successful scientific gathering. A unique example of this was the monitoring and evaluation system of the Gordon Research Conferences (GRCs), which conceptualized informal communication
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‘Visible’ compulsions: OCD and the politics of science in British clinical psychology, 1948–1975 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Eva Surawy Stepney
This article historicizes a single stage in how the contemporary obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) category was built. Starting from the position that the two central components which make up OCD are ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, it illustrates how these concepts were taken apart by a small group of clinical psychologists working at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley psychiatric hospital
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Communicating science, mediating presence: reflections on the present, past and future of conferencing The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Charlotte Bigg
The move online of almost all meetings in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic threw into sharp relief the taken-for-granted centrality of conferences within scientific culture. While its impact on science has yet to be fully grasped, for the authors of this special issue, this situation held heuristic power for understanding the meanings and functions, now and historically, of international scientific
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Watching birds: observation, photography and the ‘ethological eye’ The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-09-19 Sean Nixon
The article reflects upon the observational practices and methods developed by the early exponents of ethology committed to naturalistic field study and explores how their approaches and techniques influenced a wider field of popular natural-history filmmaking and photography. In doing so, my focus is upon three aspects of ethological field studies: the socio-technical devices used by ethologists to
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Technical conferences as a technique of internationalism The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Jessica Reinisch
This paper looks at a genre of meetings that, while neither purely ‘scientific’ nor ‘diplomatic’, drew on elements from both professional spheres and gained prominence in the interwar decades and during the Second World War. It proposes to make sense of ‘technical conferences’ as a phenomenon that was made by and through scientific experts and politicians championing the organizing power of rationality
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Negotiating the norms of an international science: standardization work at the International Geological Congress, 1878–1891 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Thomas Mougey
In the second half of the nineteenth century, geologists created the International Geological Congress (IGC) to achieve the methodological and terminological uniformity that they thought their science lacked. Their desire to standardize their practice and their use of the conference to do so was neither new nor unique. Although late nineteenth-century international conferences have been recognized
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Jodhpur and the aeroplane: aviation and diplomacy in an Indian state 1924–1952 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Aashique Ahmed Iqbal
This paper is a study of the intersection between aviation and diplomacy in the semi-autonomous Indian state of Jodhpur in the final decades of British colonial rule in India. Jodhpur's Maharaja Umaid Singh established a major international aerodrome, patronized one of India's first flying clubs and collaborated with British authorities to make aviation laws for the Indian states. He would also serve
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A plague of weasels and ticks: animal introduction, ecological disaster, and the balance of nature in Jamaica, 1870–1900 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Matthew Holmes
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, British colonists in Jamaica became increasingly exasperated by the damage caused to their sugar plantations by rats. In 1872, a British planter attempted to solve this problem by introducing the small Indian mongoose (Urva auropunctata). The animals, however, turned on Jamaica's insectivorous birds and reptiles, leading to an explosion in the tick population
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Transformations: the material representation of historical experiments in science teaching The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Peter Heering
Some experiments from the history of physics became so famous that they not only made it into the textbook canon but were transformed into lecture demonstration performances and student laboratory activities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While, at first glance, some of these demonstrations as well as the related instruments do resemble their historical ancestors, a closer examination reveals
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Presidential Address ‘Some years of cudgelling my brains about the nature and function of science museums’: Frank Sherwood Taylor and the public role of the history of science The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Tim Boon
Frank Sherwood Taylor was director of the Science Museum London for just over five years from October 1950. He was the only historian of science ever to have been director of this institution, which has always ridden a tightrope between advocacy of science and advocacy of its history, balancing differently at different points in its history. He was also president of the BSHS from 1951 to 1953. So what
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Introduction: Power to the image! Science, technology and visual diplomacy The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-06-23 Simone Turchetti, Matthew Adamson
This special issue explores the power that images with a techno-scientific content can have in international relations. As we introduce the articles in the collection, we highlight how the study of this influence extends current research in the separate (but increasingly interacting) domains of history of science and technology, and political science. We then show how images of different types (photographs
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What mysteries lay in spore: taxonomy, data, and the internationalization of mycology in Saccardo's Sylloge Fungorum The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-05-30 Brad Bolman
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
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Van Leeuwenhoek – the film: remaking memory in Dutch science cinema 1925–c.1960 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Mieneke te Hennepe
This paper examines how the production, content and reception of the film Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1924) influenced the historical framing of science. The film features microcinematography by the pioneering Dutch filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891–1954), and was part of a dynamic process of commemorating seventeenth-century microscopy and bacteriology through an early instance of visual re-creation –
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Representing noise: stacked plots and the contrasting diplomatic ambitions of radio astronomy and post-punk The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-05-18 Simone Turchetti
Sketched in 1979 by graphic designer Peter Saville, the record sleeve of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures seemingly popularized one of the most celebrated radio-astronomical images: the ‘stacked plot’ of radio signals from a pulsar. However, the sleeve's designer did not have this promotion in mind. Instead, he deliberately muddled the message it originally conveyed in a typical post-punk act of artistic
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Cesare Cremonini's non-theological cosmology: a contribution to Padua's secular culture in times of wars of religion The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Pietro Daniel Omodeo
This essay deals with the cultural-political motivations behind the cosmological conceptions of the Padua Aristotelian Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631). A defender of the interests of the university against Jesuit teachings, and one of the philosophers who was most frequently scrutinized by the Inquisition, he was an important actor in Venetian cultural politics during the years of European religious conflict
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How did a Lutheran astronomer get converted into a Catholic authority? The Jesuits and their reception of Tycho Brahe in Portugal The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-05-02 Luís Miguel Carolino
This article explores the complex process of integrating Tycho Brahe's theories into the Jesuit intellectual framework through focusing on the international community of professors who taught mathematics at the College of Saint Anthony (Colégio de Santo Antão), Lisbon, during the first half of the seventeenth century. Historians have conceived the reception of the Tychonic system as a straightforward
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The visual diplomacy of cancer treatments: the mediatic legacy of the Curies in the early transnational fight against cancer The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-04-27 Beatriz Medori
This paper analyses the role played by members of the Curie family in the visual diplomacy of cancer treatments. This relationship started in 1921, when Marie Curie travelled to the US, accompanied by her two daughters, Ève and Irène, to receive a gram of radium at the White House from President Warren Harding. In the years that followed, Ève Curie, as the biographer and natural heir of radium discoverers
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Cartoon diplomacy: visual strategies, imperial rivalries and the 1890 British Ultimatum to Portugal The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Maria Paula Diogo, Paula Urze, Ana Simões
This paper offers a novel interpretation of the 1890 British Ultimatum, by bringing to the front of the stage its techno-diplomatic dimension, often invisible in the canonical diplomatic and military narratives. Furthermore, we use an unconventional historical source to grasp the British–Portuguese imperial conflict over the African hinterland via the building of railways: the cartoons of the politically
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Showcasing the international atom: the IAEA Bulletin as a visual science diplomacy instrument, 1958–1962 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Matthew Adamson
When the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) began operations in 1958, one of its first routine tasks was to create and circulate a brief non-technical periodical. This article analyses the creation of the IAEA Bulletin and its circulation during its first years. It finds that diplomatic imperatives both in IAEA leadership circles and in the networks outside them shaped the form and appearance
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Transnational scientific advising: occupied Japan, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the establishment of the Science Council of Japan The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Kenji Ito
Given that the practices and institutions of knowledge production commonly referred to as ‘science’ are believed to have ‘Western’ origins, their apparent proliferation entails negotiations and power dynamics that shape both science and diplomacy in specific locales. This paper investigates a facet of this co-production of science and diplomacy in the emergence of knowledge infrastructure in Japan
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From museumization to decolonization: fostering critical dialogues in the history of science with a Haida eagle mask The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Efram Sera-Shriar
This paper explores the process from museumization to decolonization through an examination of a Haida eagle mask currently on display in the Exploring Medicine gallery at the Science Museum in London. While elements of this discussion are well developed in some disciplines, such as Indigenous studies, anthropology and museum and heritage studies, this paper approaches the topic through the history
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Satellite images as tools of visual diplomacy: NASA's ozone hole visualizations and the Montreal Protocol negotiations The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-02-13 Sebastian V. Grevsmühl, Régis Briday
On 16 September 1987, the main chlorofluorocarbon-producing and -consuming countries signed the Montreal Protocol, despite the absence of a scientific consensus on the mechanisms of ozone depletion over Antarctica. We argue in this article that the rapid diffusion from late 1985 onwards of satellite images showing the Antarctic ozone hole played a significant role in this diplomatic outcome. Whereas
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The winter of raw computers: the history of the lunar and planetary reductions of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-02-10 Daniel Belteki
In 1839 the working hours of the computers employed on the lunar and planetary reductions of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich were reduced from eleven hours to eight hours. Previous historians have explained this decrease by reference to the generally benevolent nature of the manager of the reductions, George Biddell Airy. By contrast, this article uses the letters and notes exchanged between Airy
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Antonio Stoppani's ‘Anthropozoic’ in the context of the Anthropocene The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-01-13 Eugenio Luciano, Elena Zanoni
The figure of Antonio Stoppani (1824–91), an Italian priest, geologist and patriot, has re-emerged in the last decade thanks to discussions gravitating around the ‘Anthropocene’ – a term used to designate a proposed geological time unit defined and characterized by the mark left by anthropogenic activities on geological records. Among these discussions, Stoppani is often considered a precursor for
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Colouring flowers: books, art, and experiment in the household of Margery and Henry Power The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2023-01-13 Christoffer Basse Eriksen, Xinyi Wen
This article examines the early modern household's importance for producing experimental knowledge through an examination of the Halifax household of Margery and Henry Power. While Henry Power has been studied as a natural philosopher within the male-dominated intellectual circles of Cambridge and London, the epistemic labour of his wife, Margery Power, has hitherto been overlooked. From the 1650s
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Stratifying seamanship: sailors’ knowledge and the mechanical arts in eighteenth-century Britain The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Elin Jones
A new genre of treatises on practical seamanship emerged in eighteenth-century Britain. Authored by a group of seamen with decades of experience on the lower deck of merchant and naval vessels, these texts represented the ship as a machine, and seamanship as a form of mechanical experiment which could only be carried out by deep-sea sailors. However, as this article finds, this group of sailor–authors
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Anti-voluntarism, natural providence and miracles in Thomas Burnet's Theory of the Earth The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-12-19 Thomas Rossetter
In his Telluris Theoria Sacra and its English translation The Theory of the Earth (1681–90), the English clergyman and schoolmaster Thomas Burnet (c.1635–1715) constructed a geological history from the Creation to the Final Consummation, positing predominantly natural causes to explain biblical events and their effects on the Earth and life on it. Burnet's insistence on appealing primarily to natural
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Commercial television and primate ethology: facial expressions between Granada and London Zoo The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-12-19 Miles Kempton
This article examines the significant relationship that existed between commercial British television and the study of animal behaviour. Ethological research provided important content for the new television channel, at the same time as that coverage played a substantial role in creating a new research specialism, the study of primate facial expressions, for this emergent scientific discipline. The
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Medicine and Arabic literary production in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Nicole Khayat, Liat Kozma
The selection of nineteenth-century Arabic texts on medical education, medicine and health demonstrates the significant link between the revival of the Arabic language and literary culture of the nineteenth century, known as the nahda, and the introduction of medical education to the Ottoman Empire. These include doctor Ibrahim al-Najjar's autobiographical account of his studies in Cairo (1855), an
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Re-examining globalization and the history of science: Ottoman and Middle Eastern experiences The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Jane H. Murphy, Sahar Bazzaz
For several decades historians of science have interrogated the relationship between empire and science, largely focusing on European imperial powers. At the same time, scholars have sought alternatives to an early diffusionist model of the spread of modern science, seeking to capture the multi-directional and dialogic development of science and its institutions in most parts of the globe. The papers
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Innovations from the Levant: smallpox inoculation and perceptions of scientific medicine The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Victoria N. Meyer
Modern public-health initiatives in industrialized countries revolve around immunization against contagious diseases. The practice of engendering immunity against disease through disease first emerged in Western European social and medical landscapes in the eighteenth century as inoculation, based on the imported Middle Eastern practice of ‘engrafting’. By the nineteenth century, this practice had
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Islamic philosophy and the globalization of science: Ahmed Cevdet's translation of the sixth chapter of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-10-31 Kenan Tekin
This article contributes to the study of the globalization of science through an analysis of Ahmed Cevdet's nineteenth-century translation of the sixth chapter of Ibn Khaldun's (d. 1406) Muqaddimah, which deals with the nature and history of science. Cevdet's translation and Ottomanization of that text demonstrate that science did not simply originate in Europe to be subsequently distributed to the
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Introduction: the issue of duplicates The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Ina Heumann, Anne Greenwood MacKinney, Rainer Buschmann
The permanent preservation of objects in global custodianship is a captivating ideal that informs countless museums’ corporate identities and governs collection guidelines as well as politics. Recent research has challenged the alleged perpetuity of collections and collected items, revealing their coherence as fragile and dependent on historically, politically and culturally specific conditions. Duplicates
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Visual duplication: specimens, works of art and photographs at the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro (1928–1935) The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-08-08 Anaïs Mauuarin
The article considers how the use of duplicates and the practice of photography interacted in museums of ethnography, contributing to the ambivalent framing of ethnographic objects as items that can be both scientific specimens and works of art. It focuses on the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris and on the key period of its reorganization between 1928 and 1935, which was central to the institutionalization
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Globalizing ‘science and religion’: examples from the late Ottoman Empire The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-08-02 M. Alper Yalçınkaya
This article brings together insights from efforts to develop a global history of science and recent historical and sociological studies on the relations between science and religion. Using the case of the late Ottoman Empire as an example, it argues that ‘science and religion’ can be seen as a debate that travelled globally in the nineteenth century, generating new conceptualizations of both science
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Contested duplicates: disputed negotiations surrounding ethnographic doppelgängers in German New Guinea, 1898–1914 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-06-20 Rainer F. Buschmann
The issue of duplicates and duplication in ethnographic collection is frequently regarded as a process that begins and ends in the museum as a fundamental act of the process of curating. In contrast, this article maintains, this practice occurred all along the chain of collecting, where indigenous artefacts operated as items of exchange in the context of the colonial encounter. Using the example of
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Malinowski and malacology: global value systems and the issue of duplicates The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-06-20 Dániel Margócsy
This article situates the collecting practices of museums of natural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in dialogue with similar practices amongst societies in the Pacific by focusing on how European curators, dealers in natural history and Pacific Islanders shared a common fascination with Spondylus shells. In particular, this article examines the processes for turning Spondylus
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Curating duplicates: operationalizing similiarity in the Smithsonian Institution with Haida rattles, 1880–1926 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Catherine A. Nichols
In the late nineteenth century, the anthropology curators of the Smithsonian Institution consulted their cataloguing systems and storerooms, assessing specimens in order to determine which could be designated as duplicate specimens and exchanged with museums domestically and abroad. The status of ‘duplicate’ for specimens was contingent on conceptions of similiarity impacted by disciplinary classification
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Science by Nobel committee: decision making and norms of scientific practice in the early physics and chemistry prizes The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Gustav Källstrand
This paper examines the early years of decision making in the award of the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, and shows how the prize became a tool in the boundary work which upheld the social demarcations between scientists and inventors, as well as promoting a particular normative view of individual scientific achievement. The Nobel committees were charged with rewarding scientific achievements
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Medicine and the heavens in Padua's Faculty of Arts, 1570–1630 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Craig Martin
In the faculty of arts at the University of Padua in the years around 1600 professors debated the reliability of astrology, the existence of occult celestial influences, and the idea that celestial heat is present in living bodies. From the 1570s to the 1620s many professors in the faculty of arts pushed back against astrology and Jean Fernel's theories surrounding astral body. Girolamo Mercuriale
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‘Armed with the necessary background of knowledge’: embedding science scrutiny mechanisms in the UK Parliament The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Emmeline Ledgerwood
The unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the demands placed upon parliamentarians to scrutinize and evaluate evidence-based government proposals, making visible the parliamentary mechanisms that enable them to do so. This paper examines the steps that led two such mechanisms to become embedded in the institution of Parliament during from 1964 to 2001: the House of Commons
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Duplicate networks: the Berlin botanical institutions as a ‘clearing house’ for colonial plant material, 1891–1920 The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-04-26 Katja Kaiser
For centuries, herbarium specimens were the focus of exchange in global botanical networks. The aim was the ‘complete’ registration of the flora, for which ‘complete’ collections in botanical institutions worldwide were considered to be a necessary basis, although this ardently sought-after ideal was never achieved. The study of colonial plants became a special priority of botanical research in the
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Einsteinian language: Max Talmey, Benjamin Lee Whorf and linguistic relativity The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-04-19 Michael D. Gordin
This paper explores the significant – albeit little-known – impact that physicist Albert Einstein's theory of relativity had on the development of the science of linguistics. Both Max Talmey, a physician who played a key role in the development of early twentieth-century constructed-language movements, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who is closely associated with the notion of ‘linguistic relativity’, drew
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‘A remedy for this dread disease’: Achille Sclavo, anthrax and serum therapy in early twentieth-century Britain The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-04-06 James F. Stark
In the years around 1900 one of the most significant practical consequences of new styles of bacteriological thought and practice was the development of preventive vaccines and therapeutic sera. Historical scholarship has highlighted how approaches rooted in the laboratory methods of Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur and their collaborators were transformed in local contexts and applied in diverse ways to
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Caribou crossings: the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, conservation, and stakeholdership in the Anthropocene The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Simone Schleper
This article engages with notions of conservation in the Anthropocene from a history-of-science perspective. It does so by looking at an iconic case of infrastructure development that since the 1970s continues to cause controversies amongst wildlife experts: the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). I examine how, from the 1970s onwards, the TAPS functioned as an experimental device for ecologists to
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Duplicates under the hammer: natural-history auctions in Berlin's early nineteenth-century collection landscape The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Anne Greenwood MacKinney
The nineteenth-century museum and auction house are seemingly distinct spaces with opposing functions: while the former represents a contemplative space that accumulates objects of art and science, the latter provides a forum for lively sales events that disperse wares to the highest bidders. This contribution blurs the border between museums and marketplaces by studying the Berlin Zoological Museum's
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Diarmid A. Finnegan, The Voice of Science: British Scientists on the Lecture Circuit in Gilded Age America Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Pp. xiii + 286. ISBN 978-0-8229-4681-6. $60.00 (hardback). The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 James A. Secord
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Elena Aronova, Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. 256. ISBN 978-0-2267-6138-1. $45.00 (hardback). The British Journal for the History of Science (IF 1.245) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Alex Langstaff
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