Abstracts Archive

[...] Rational Mechanics will be the sciences of motion resulting from any forces whatsoever, and of the forces required to produce any motion, accurately proposed and demonstrated [...] And therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of his philosophy. For all the difficulty of philosop...

      My presentation focuses on the archaeology expedition conducted by American archaeologist Carl Bishop in China during the early twentieth century. Based on the archival material currently housed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Smiths...

Was Vincenzo Galilei—composer, lutanist, and father of Galileo—an experimental scientist? Historians of science and music alike have agonized over this question. In 1589, Vincenzo recounted observations, taken from sonorous objects including lute strings and organ pipes, that seemed to contradic...

In January 1978, a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite plunged from orbit. Radioactive fragments of the spacecraft landed in a region of the Canadian Arctic known as “the Barrens.” Canadian state officials and journalists alike expressed relief that the accident had occurred in a place seemingly de...

       At the turn of the twentieth century,  Historically Black Colleges and Universities stood as symbols of racial pride for black America. They were also places where intense missions dedicated to uplift ideology were weaved into tradition collegiate cirriculum.  Th...

“Presidents might come and Presidents might go, but the White House squirrels presumably could go on forever,” Richard Neuberger told his Senate colleagues in a 1955 speech condemning relocation of some squirrels to distant areas. Neuberger referred to the Eastern gray squirrels living on the Wh...

Against the backdrop of the Cold War, several midcentury biologists worked to radically revise the basic idea of evolution, broadening it far beyond its traditional scope. Drawing heavily on the work of French paleontologist and idiosyncratic Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, biologists ...

Throughout the nineteenth century, American physicians and scientists invoked the term “monster” in efforts to collect, classify, and theorize the bodies of infants with extreme congenital anomalies. They also marshaled new frameworks of “monstrous” development to advance claims about racial...

In 1955, geographer Carl Sauer and geneticist Edgar Anderson were reunited in Princeton, New Jersey for the conference “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.” Sauer, one of the conference organizers, delivered the paper “The Agency of Man on Earth,” in which he argued that althoug...

In early seventeenth-century Rome, the per capita consumption of meat rose to nearly a pound per day. This enormous consumption was not just about luxury, but also spoke to the ways in which the papacy sought to remake its city and the bodies of its citizens in the wake of the Reformation. For a bri...

In April 1973 m, Lawrence Lerner and I published an article in Scientific American in which we argued that Giordano Bruno was not a scientist in the Galilean sense of the word. In November 1986. Lerner and I published another article in Scientific American, arguing that a root cause o...

Following British officials’ recommendation to stop prescribing oral contraceptives linked to blood clots, US Senator Gaylord Nelson began collecting testimony from experts in 1970. He asked: Is the pill safe? Do women have enough information to make informed decisions? Histories of the pill and t...

At a time when the learned public of Paris was increasingly captivated by the wonders of science and new discoveries, the publication of books and pamphlets became a means a choice for any “savant” to get the readers’ attention and, hopefully, gain recognition from the members of the Académie...

At the end of the nineteenth century, the kingdom of Siam was beset by the threat of foreign imperial intervention. Unequal treaties restricted its sovereignty in matters of trade and finance and established extraterritorial legal protections for foreign residents. As the external threat of imperial...

The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by widespread optimism about biology’s ability to improve the world, catalysed by promising new theories about inheritance and evolution (particularly Hugo de Vries’ mutation theory and Mendel’s newly rediscovered ideas). In Britain and th...

This panel examines how in the second half of the 20th century, the human sciences employed mathematical, engineering, and computer sciences to model, formalize, and control the human mind and behavior. The simulation of social and mental processes was relevant for computer programming, the scientif...

What makes one research program croak, and another purr? Touted as the origin point of second-order cybernetics, the 1959 paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” emerged from attempts by MIT’s Warren McCulloch, Jerome Lettvin, and others to apply cybernetic logic to living brain...

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or feedlots, are sites in which animal bodies are produced through the systematic application of scientific knowledge, state regulations, and the logic of capitalism. It is where cattle are “finished” on genetically-modified grains laced with hormones and ...

In recent years, historians of both science and the arts have recognized the vital role of craft knowledge and artisanal practice in the development of the premodern sciences. Nevertheless, unraveling the complex relationships between speculative/intellectual and practical/artisanal traditions in th...

This panel aims to consider the contributions of Asian traditions of scholarship to the formation of modern disciplines commonly seen as Western in origin. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, academic disciplines now grouped as the humanities and social sciences took shape in new univers...

  Insights of book historians into the production and circulation of printed items have alerted historians of science to the scientific book as a material, commercial, and epistemic object. In recent years the scope of interest has broadened to include scientific paper technologies, scribal pra...

  Noise has been a common sonic experience since the beginning of history.  For a long time, noise was construed as sound of any form, aggregate of sounds, voice, cry, or roar that was voluminous, disturbing, composite, or extraordinary.  By the nineteenth century, however, two speci...

    Since the 1970’s epidemiological measures focusing on “health-related quality of life” have figured increasingly as endpoints in clinical trials. Before the 1970’s these measures were known, generically, as functional measures or health status measures. Relabeled as “quality ...

In this talk I assess how the availability of Newton's writings in a searchable, digital format has transformed our capacity to understand and explain his intellectual work. I examine the ways in which the existence of various datasets has allowed modern researchers both to examine Newton's work in ...

This essay examines the maternity ward records in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico in order to understand the hospital as a space where mothers, doctors, and midwives encountered one another and the State, and where they sought to legitimize and define the field of medicine at a time when childbirth ...

This panel explores intersections between human bodies and formal systems in the twentieth-century. The panel cuts across the history of forensics, mathematics, computing, and dance in order to demonstrate how different communities have worked to erase bodies, represent bodies, control bodies, ident...

Southern California is the land of sunshine, outdoor adventures, and opportunities. It is the place of movies, aerospace industry, and a bastion of scientific research activities. These images are the result of active promotion by the region’s boosters for the past 150 years, as Southern Californi...

The paper deals with the attitudes toward, the uses and the receptions of the science on the Italian Catholic press in the second half the 19th Century. In the course of the nineteenth century and particularly in the second half of the century, science started having a growing influence on...

August Boeckh (1785-1867) is still esteemed for a publication that appears to be a comprehensive handbook of all weights and measures of antiquity. In succinct numerical prose, he demonstrates the interrelatedness of all metrological systems of the Mediterranean world up to the sixth century. But th...

In an attempt to create a more coherent general picture of the history of science, historians have offered suggestions for categorizing the large-scale historical transformations in understanding nature, including "Ways of Knowing" (Pickstone) or "Styles of Knowing" (Kwa) and the use of mechanical m...

During the nineteenth century, chemists were involved in conservation treatments of polychrome artworks. Appropriate methods for the cleaning of easel paintings, for instance, were sometimes done in consultation with chemists. In the field of archaeology, paint samples were extracted from historical...

In recent years, “diffusionism” has emerged as the most prominent bogeyman, if not straw man, for non-Eurocentric histories of science: witness proliferating critiques of Basalla, of Cold War development, of modernization theory. Such targets, however, should strike us as too easy. If we would n...

From the 1850s onwards, the Parisian Academy of Sciences awarded the Prix Bréant to incentivize all sorts of contributions in the fight against cholera. We use the Bréant archive in order to reappraise an old debate within the History of Spanish medicine regarding the merits of Jaume Ferrán’s a...

How did a supposedly blind man living on one island collect natural-historical knowledge about an archipelago of tens of thousands? This paper discusses the inter-island information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius (1627-1702) who, living on the island of Ambon from the age of 25 until his death,...

In 1956, the Royal Society and the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey collaborated to send a small expedition to make glaciological observations on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia during the International Geophysical Year. Jeremy Smith thought his partner, Richard Brown, to be lazy and u...

From June 1905 through November 1906, a full 17 months, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco sent out a group of eight sailor-scientists and three crew members on the schooner Academy to the Galapagos Islands to collect more and better specimens than Charles Darwin, or any other exped...

In 2003, the fossilized skeleton of a new member of the human evolutionary family was unearthed on a remote island in Southeast Asia. This small skeleton surprised the discovery team of international scientists, causing them to fiercely disagree over the significance of creature’s tiny brain, prim...

In 1912, ethno-botanist Melvin Gilmore met with White Horse, an elderly member of Nebraska’s Omaha Nation. White Horse described the terrible transformation he had seen in his lifetime: “Now the face of all the land is changed and sad. The living creatures are gone. I see the land desolate, and ...

In a 1944 letter to Robert Thornton, Albert Einstein described the pedagogical value of HPS, expressing his concern that “[s]o many people today – and even professional scientists – seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest.” While he was responding...

When Carl O. Sauer and William Thomas began planning the “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” conference, they initially envisioned it as being a celebration of the 19th century conservationist George Perkins Marsh. As such, it seemed obvious to Sauer and Thomas that they could not p...

Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche (FLF) has been remembered either as an unsuccessful supporter of the settler project or a misunderstood subversive social scientist. Before his appointment with the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology in 1910, FLF worked for three decades with ethnologist and allotment agen...

   In 1903, the Select Committee on Ventilation, appointed by Britain's House of Commons, published a critical review of ‘modern’ ventilation systems. It decried the infamous lack of success engineers had had in ventilating the Houses of Parliament, but, more critically, it noted new s...

In response to the events in Chicago in 1968, several professional societies moved their annual meetings from Chicago to other cities, but the Association of Computing Machinery chose not to. In response, a group of computer scientists attempted to organize “The Counter-Conference,” a conference...

From 1896 to 1898 three Anglo-Australian expeditions were made to the Pacific atoll of Funafuti to test competing theories of coral reef formation, one published by Charles Darwin more than fifty years earlier and the other proposed by John Murray as a consequence of his research on the 1872-1876 vo...

The play “Watts” in a Home, written by Britain’s Electrical Association for Women (EAW) and first performed in 1930, stages a history of domestic electrical lighting in Britain between 1880 and 1930. The play bears similarities to other triumphalist “electrical propaganda” produced in a ra...

The modern research university is divided into three distinct branches: the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. This particular constitution is far from evident, as the nature of knowledge and the relations between different realms of knowledge have been regularly redefined th...

In the face of both decolonization and the threat of human extinction, many anthropologists in theCold War sought to shake the discipline out of what they saw as its post-Boasian doldrums. In thispaper, I use Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, the massive cross-disciplinary symposium of...

  Presented in 1869, the Periodic System is still an icon in contemporary science, even though the understanding of elements and chemical reactions has evolved tremendously over the last 150 years. The resilience of the Periodic System to conceptual changes is remarkable, and the fine structur...

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Knowledge is more than the sum of its facts. Historians have shown how intuitions, beliefs, rituals, fictions, and other ways of knowing bolster the cultural authority of scientific thinking in every era. Despite the ubiquity and importance of these alternatives to fact, knowledge claims still tend ...

This paper addresses questions about the current shape of the humanities raised through two experimental jewelry arts workshops held at a vocational school in the Canadian Arctic. These workshops investigated the idea of an artisanal epistemology in early modern enquiries into the natural world in r...

As it transited from tech to university in the late 1960s, Carnegie Mellon started the School of Urban and Public Affairs (SUPA) with the ambition to “deal in a scientific manner with problems of the public sector” and help build the “civil-industrial complex.” Funded by gifts from the Richa...

Prosthetic hands in early modern Europe were singular objects of artifice designed to supplement the natural body.  With moveable fingers and flesh-toned paint, they incorporated practical and aesthetic functions in ways impossible for other kinds of prostheses.  After all, silver noses could not ...

In early modern Europe, many princes saw enormous value in supporting natural knowledge at court, regularly supporting experts who could extend the power of the state over nature and sustain the health of the sovereign. In the mid-sixteenth century, however, a disturbing cluster of incidents at seve...

This paper examines human and animal bodies that were painstakingly assembled and programmed by clockmakers during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries in the German-speaking world. Known today as automata, these self-propelled mechanical objects have long been seen by scholars as exemplary of th...

Situated at the intersection between the history of technology, economic history, and diplomatic history, this paper examines China’s three major waves of technology transfer during the Cold War period: from the Soviet in the 1950s, from Western European countries, the United States, and Japan in ...

Standard histories of psychiatry rely heavily on the distinction between psychogenic and biogenic approaches to mental illness. This distinction provides a framework for grouping actors into larger configurations, tracing the tensions between those configurations, and explaining psychiatry’s major...

 The concepts of biological specificity (of species, macromolecules, genes etc.) and genetic causality (in particular regarding heredity and development) played an important role in rendering biology a modern experimental science in the nineteenth century. Neglecting these concepts often led to sta...

Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN AR-SA Histories of science are traditionally plotted on chronologies that explain the rise of modern European science. These chronologies, even when globalized, have foregrounded the privileging of European history and provided justificatory narratives for colo...

This talk will explore the relation of the notion of body to the Aristotelian categorial scheme as expressed in the distinction between body as substance (corpus substantia) and quantified body (corpus quantum) employed by thirteenth and fourteenth-century thinkers. The focus will be on the early th...

In 1960, veterinarians discovered an unknown toxic substance in poultry feed to have caused the death of hundreds of thousands of British turkeys. Veterinarians collaborated with nutrition scientists, chemists, toxicologists, and mycologists to identify what became known as aflatoxin, a carcinogenic...

In the middle of the nineteenth century, lawyer and naturalist Peter A. Browne of Philadelphia obsessively collected, measured, and classified the hair of humans and animals. He built what he claimed to be the largest collection of hair specimens in the world. Browne had at least two major goals in ...

In the nineteenth century, European savants sought to reconstruct the history of the earth. The character of the evidence was routinely faunal, utilizing ossified organisms. Such methods built upon Georges Cuvier’s concept of a natural hierarchy of animal functions, which designated specific anato...

Despite having relative prominence in the early years of the emergence of professional history of science as a discipline, history of chemistry declined in prominence and has played only a small role in attempts to craft “grand narratives,” “big pictures,” or textbooks in history of modern s...

Friedrich August Wolf famously criticized the work of Christian Gottlob Heyne. Many subsequent scholars have accepted Wolf’s criticisms noting, among other things, that Heyne was uninterested in the kinds of rigorous textual criticism that would come to define philology’s nineteenth-century stat...

The medical career of Mississippi native Andrew Bowles Holder (1860-1896) began inauspiciously. After receiving his medical degree, he obtained his first post thanks to his father’s letter to the Office of Indian Affairs, which resulted in Holder’s appointment as physician to the Crow Agency in ...

This session explores the history of attempts to visualize climate as a spatial phenomenon and the use of maps as historical records of climate change. The focus is on the early nineteenth to the mid twentieth century in central Europe, colonial Africa, and the United States, important contexts for ...

Accidents of geology and history made Kentucky’s Inner Bluegrass region into one of the world’s premier areas for raising thoroughbred horses. Limestone-rich soils provided the region’s eponymous grasses with high levels of calcium and other nutrients that resulted in strong and fast-growing h...

The arrival of electricity as an everyday scientific and technological phenomenon into colonial Calcutta from the late-1870s onwards coincided with the emergence of the Bengali theatre as a physical and metaphorical stage to publicly portray, discuss and debate the contemporary social, cultural and ...

This paper will explore the relationship and tensions between curanderismo–a traditional Mexican faith-healing practice–and professional medicine in the Mexico-Texas borderlands over the turn of the century by examining both the Mexican and U.S. government's attempts at regulating healing practi...

While fish fueled the making of modern Southeast Asia, they also fed the growth of Malay nationalism. This paper looks at the relationship between fish and politics through the career of Ishak bin Ahmad (1887-1969), a fisheries scientist who became the first non-European to head a department in Mala...

In 1955, an influential group of scholars, who included historians, geographers, ecologists, and zoologists gathered at the Princeton Inn for the international symposium “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.” Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation ...

In the last half of the nineteenth century, Western scientists expected the global extinction of large game animals as a consequence of encroaching human activities, especially land-intensive practices like farming and ranching. Extinction was seen as the inevitable, if lamentable, byproduct of huma...

In 1923, just three years after becoming a museum, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History sent 16 men on an expedition to collect scientific specimens. The Blossom Expedition, named after Elizabeth Bingham Blossom who sponsored the voyage, set out from New London, Connecticut, to explore the island...

  In the first decade of the Cold War, scientific dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union was reduced to occasional contacts at conferences. As scientific practices became more collaborative and global, two of the leading academic communities barely enjoyed any communication. T...

The Kaplan Daguerreotype dates from the early 1840s and is thought by some to depict the young Abraham Lincoln. Competing authorities, from historians to reconstructive surgeons, have weighed in with their professional opinions as to whether or not the man in the image is the former president. In th...

Prenatal health care emerged in the early twentieth century amidst immigration anxieties, urban squalor, and global consciousness. As physicians and public health departments began to campaign for the medical surveillance of all pregnant women, they framed their arguments in terms of gender, race, n...

  The publication of Hayek’s principal work in “theoretical psychology” – The Sensory Order – was the end of a thirty-years-long endeavor, that begun in Monakow’s Zurich neurological laboratories, passed through Vienna, and London, and was concluded at the Committee of Social Though...

This session explores architecture’s place in the postwar research university. Specifically, it examines academic architects’ adoption of scientific ideals and methods, their crafting of a scientific imaginary of architecture, and these trans-actions’ lasting effects on the discipline’s ever...

This paper focuses on a significant cluster of scientists based in the United Kingdom whose engagement with China stemmed from a mixture of socialism, scientific internationalism, and scholarly friendships. Some, like Joseph Needham and J.D. Bernal, were ‘ideological notables’ as well known for ...

The modern interdisciplinary field of neuroscience is often thought to have begun as a result of the efforts of the biophysicist F. O. Schmitt, who spearheaded the growth of the Neurosciences Research Program (NRP) at MIT in the 1950s. This historical understanding is largely incorrect. At the same ...

One might expect that our knowledge about a figure as well known and influential as Isaac Newton would be in a settled state after some three hundred years of historical research.  The present session reveals the reality to be quite the contrary.  The world of Newton scholarship is in a st...

The production of alum crystal constituted a major manufacturing and international trading market in Europe from late medieval times onward. Its major use was as a mordant, a dye fixative, which had the further property of brightening the colours which it fixed. It had additional uses in leather tan...

The papers in this session examine some of the attitudes and beliefs that various religious liberals held in conversation with science in England and America, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. The first paper demonstrates that American Unitarians used “natural law theod...

Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century art history arises as a scientific discipline, taking part in the process of systematization of the human sciences in their relationship to the natural sciences. From the perspective of the history of science this period can be seen a...

On a Sunday morning in 1805, Father Andrés Rosillo y Meruélo preached about a marvelous new discovery—a vaccine that promised to save his parishioners and their families from disease. The priest proclaimed in his sermon that day that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross not only enabled man’s ete...

Beginning in the 1950s, two laboratories – one in the United States and one in the Soviet Union – engaged in the synthesis of elements with an atomic number greater than 100 (a third laboratory, in West Germany, began production in the 1980s).  Each relied on different methods for synthesis...

  I argue that William Bateson’s analogies between the units of genetics and chemical elements are best understood as analogies to theoretical entities in the history and practice of chemistry. Bateson did not intend that the units of heredity answer to material units that behave in ways anal...

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to train a strong military to ward off the Nationalists and Japanese in wartime Yanan, but faced tremendous challenges in protecting the health of its residents. Scholars have focused on the role of Norman Bethune in developing health care and scientific rese...

In 2016 Deborah Gordon proposed that the term ‘division of labor’ was misleading and ought to be abandoned. The problem with the term, as she saw it, was that it implied a division of labor among specialized castes of workers to explain colony behavior. In a series of experiments in the 1980s, G...

Historians of science have long been interested in the relationship between the making of scientific knowledge and emerging forms of nationalistic thinking. This panel gives a comparative examination of the intertwining of biology and nationalism in twentieth-century Korea and China. Consisting...

Contemporary geographies and their histories are connected to debates around immigration that are ingrained in the ethnonationalist views of racial difference and purity. From apartheid walls, isolated ghettos, enclosed reservations, to the sinking bodies of dead immigrants in the Mediterranean, the...

Over the last several years, scholars have increasingly attended to the role of craft knowledge and artisanal practices in early modern Europe. These studies have investigated the importance of hands-on experience for ways of knowing about the world and pointed to the significance of artisanal pract...

Logic became a mathematical science in the decades around 1900; that same period saw a wild proliferation of systems for representing the newly mathematical logic on paper. The fertile period for notational invention that began with English mathematician George Boole’s algebraic methods in the mid...

Scientists and fiction-writers face the common challenge of awakening their readers' senses. Especially when offering a new model or perspective, scientists share the creative writer's task of using language to activate the imagination, of getting readers to see what they mean. To feel real, languag...

The problem of integrating chemistry into “grand narratives” or macro-scale studies of the past applies not only to the history of science but also to history more generally. How has chemistry figured in the history of politics, industry, education, or the environment, in the longue durée? Chem...

In his First Part of a Dictionary of Chemistry (1789), the Scottish chemist James Keir claimed, ‘The progress of Chemistry within the last twenty years has been more rapid than…any science in an equal period.’ Around the mid-eighteenth century onwards, it is no surprise then to see the princ...

In seventeenth-century Europe the practice of curating specific alchemical texts in order to create a comprehensive body of work increased rapidly owing to the technology of the printing press and the belief that these types of tract were most successful when used in tandem. Evidence of readership p...

Throughout much of the nineteenth-century in Ojibwe communities in the western Great Lakes of the United States, community members participated in a medically plural environment, seeking medical care from within their own communities as well as from French and Scots-Irish fur traders, New Englan...

In 1968, Taiwanese planners began to consider how to market their considerable expertise in agricultural science, accumulated after decades of success at increasing agricultural yields and raising daily caloric intake.  At the same time, the rise of the Green Revolution placed high-yield crop c...