Abstracts Archive

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

In 1876, an unlikely candidate was considered for election to the Royal Society. Whilst his sunken eyes betrayed a lifetime spent in intellectual study, his body was crippled by years of working-class labour. The candidate was James Croll (1821-90). His qualifications for election were considerable:...

Throughout the Cold War, colonies became preferred sites of nuclear weapons experimentation. The United States initiated this trend when it began testing weapons offshore in the Marshall Islands where, between 1946 and 1958, it detonated 67 of its largest nuclear bombs. As historians of science and ...

Twenty-five years ago, Lisa Bloom’s "Gender on Ice" (1993) drew historians’ attention to the ideologies of masculinism and nationalism operating in historical discourses of polar exploration and science. Key to Bloom’s intervention was an analysis of the white, masculine heroism performed and ...

The proposed panel seeks to bring together recent trends in the history of animals, science, and the environment to expose how animals and their bodies participate in the knowledge production of human science. Our papers demonstrate that the knowability of nature around the world is directly relate...

The end of the First World War also marked the end of the German overseas empire. And while it was ultimately a rather quiet and subdued end, colonialism did not vanish without a trace. During the thirty years of German colonial presence in Africa, China, and the Pacific islands, geographers and cli...

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...

“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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

In the 2017 HSS Distinguished Lecture, Sverker Sörlin described the Northern Turn in the history of science; a wave of recent histories examining knowledge-making in the Arctic. Expanding this Northern Turn, the papers in this session explore ways of telling “other” histories of cold places. Cr...

An outbreak of encephalitis in 1938 Massachusetts sent health officials scrambling to find a way to explain the epidemic. Upon the deaths of eight children, brain matter from an infected child was used to inoculate horses, resulting in the confirmation of a distinct disease that could infect both hu...

As Napoleon extended his control across Italy at the start of the 19th century he faced two unexpected foes, the locust and the mosquito.  Although both insects created challenges for Napoleon’s administration, French awareness of these threats differed markedly.  While locust infestations posed...

In 1955, the climatologist C. Warren Thornthwaite presented a paper to the conference on Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth in which he proposed a way to improve the “water economy” of drought-prone regions. The language he used was one of “balance,” and the hope that he had was ...

This session explores the intersection of geology and ecology in the 19th and 20th centuries. The questions we pursue are: How did scientists use information from one time-period or region to infer features of another, distant, time period or region? How did they determine which questions were worth...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The United Fruit Company (UFCo) is notorious for its influence on Latin American political and economic life during the twentieth century. UFCo’s power was rooted in its control and transformation of land. By the 1930s, it controlled more than 3.5 million acres. While converting lowland Caribbean ...

In 1908 a huge blast occurred over the Siberian taiga in a land inhabited primarily by indigenous Evenki. When Soviet scientists first investigated the event two decades later, they assumed it had been caused by a meteorite. Yet traces were never found. This inconclusiveness eventually led to wide-r...

In the spring of 1941, the United States Army Corps of Engineers authorized an ambitious geological investigation of the alluvial valley of lower Mississippi. This project would occupy the Mississippi River Commission for the next three and a half years, and its final report would showcase the remar...

As Napoleon extended his control across Italy at the start of the 19th century he faced two unexpected foes, the locust and the mosquito.  Although both insects created challenges for Napoleon’s administration, French awareness of these threats differed markedly.  While locust infestations posed...

In June 1966 Hungarian-French architect Yona Friedman traveled to Folkestone,UK to join the International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture (IDEA)— a large two-day symposium on radical experiments with architecture and urbanism. A leading figure of “prospective” international groups of arc...

Paleoecology, which studies environmental change through geologic time, often made predictions about ecological change by comparing the changes experienced by vegetation communities in the past with similar changes facing modern communities. The modern analog method, which relied on these comparison...