Abstracts Archive

21st-century wildlife films promote authenticity through the extensive use of making-of-documentaries (MODs), showcasing filmmaker trustworthiness and innovations in filmmaking practices and equipment. MODs have a long and understudied history, evolving in parallel with feature films. Enjoying recen...

Shortly before his death in 2015, Oliver Sacks wrote about the mental life of plants. Charles Darwin contemplated a related set of questions before his own death in 1882, as he investigated the movement of climbing plants. Plant life, as shown in Darwin's books on the subject, is both active and int...

Early Cold War anxiety over nuclear conflict generated an unusually rapid speed of proving grounds, a site designated for military tests in technology, along the Florida coastline. Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex—a region historically occupied by the native Ais tribe and their “crude and flims...

My work encompasses various digital humanities projects on the representation of urban space in early Boston. I will discuss the tools I used for this project, and the promising applications of digital humanities tools to better understant environmental history and the history of science as a whole....

Martin Wagner (1885-1957) was a leading city planner of the Weimar Republic, chief planner for Greater Berlin (1926 to 1933), planning theorist, and mastermind of social housing ventures. Relocating in 1938 to the United States, where he taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Wa...

At the turn of the twentieth-century, South African fauna was under significant threat. Devastating zoonotic diseases, plagues of birds, locusts, and carnivora had convinced veterinarians and farmers that wildlife and ‘civilisation’ could not coexist. Corn, citrus, and cattle had evicted bushvel...

Periodization in the history of science is governed by the appearance of certain texts: Newton (1687), Lavoisier (1789), Lyell (1833), Darwin (1859), Einstein (1905), Watson and Crick (1953). Knowing the names and dates, we can call off the titles of these works, all seen to initiate a new phase in ...

In 1879, Samuel R. Elson, Marine Pilot on the Hooghly River, published a rhyming pamphlet entitled The Sailor’s East Indian Sky Interpreter and Weather Book. Contained in its clever couplets was the experienced navigator's expert advice for his "brother sailors" on how to detect and...

This paper explores how physicists of the Laser-Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) attempted to locate their research on military sites, LIGO’s negotiations with the administrators of these sites such as the U.S. military, and LIGO’s response to claimed national security concer...

The Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) at Wakehurst place in West Sussex, England is the largest repository of plant genetics resources (PGRs) in the world. Founded in 2000, the MSB functions as a hub for a global partnership program between the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and local partners from over 80 cou...

 This panel will explore three episodes of potential radiation exposure among indigenous group in the far north during the twentieth century. We aim to better understand Cold War anxieties about nuclear radiation and the relationship between outside experts and indigenous peoples living in contamin...

By 1900, a wide range of schemes for mapping climate had emerged in Europe. What most of them had in common was the absence of weather. They represented climate as a static variable, a long-term average, in which phenomena on the time scale of weather—clouds, storms, and gales—were invisible. Ho...

Cobb Seamount, first discovered in 1950 off the coast of Washington, was the focus of a multi-year scientific research program named “Project Sea Use” from 1968 until 1975. This collaborative effort, involving private industry, state government, and the U.S. military, aimed to install a...

At the turn of the twentieth-century, South African fauna was under significant threat. Devastating zoonotic diseases, plagues of birds, locusts, and carnivora had convinced veterinarians and farmers that wildlife and ‘civilisation’ could not coexist. Corn, citrus, and cattle had evicted bushvel...

Project Sanguine was a controversial program to develop a network of power stations, amplifiers, and 6000-miles of antenna cable to serve as a communication transmitter capable of sending signals to submerged submarines around the globe. Publically proposed in 1968, northern Wisconsin was chosen as ...

   Many traditional societies, often referred to as indigenous or tribal people, have accumulated a whole lot of empirical knowledge on the basis of their experience while dealing with Nature and natural resources. This traditional wisdom is based on the intrinsic realization that man and ...

In 1995, dental surgeon-turned-planetary scientist and terraforming expert Martyn J. Fogg authored the seminal “technical-level” book on the history, science, and prospects of “engineering planetary environments.” In this book published by the Society of Automotive Engineers, Fogg categorize...

This paper explores the work of Scottish scientist James Croll (1821-1890), whose interest lay in explaining the underlying principles—not just the physical, geologic remains—of the Ice Ages. In 1875, Croll published Climate and Time in their Geologic Relations: A Theory of the Secular Changes o...

In May 1993, a group of scientific experts and public officials from circumpolar nations gathered in Anchorage to assess the human and environmental legacies of the Cold War in the Far North. Senator Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) opened the meeting by calling for action on the part of the participants ...

In his pathbreaking 1996 article, Michael Bravo called for greater attention to non-Western knowledge systems and how Western actors have tried to render these systems commensurate with Western science. This paper heeds Bravo’s call by examining this process of creating commensurability in the car...

Darwin's theory of Coral Reefs, developed between 1835 and 1842, is commonly interpreted as subservient to his geology—constructed in order to provide evidence of subsidence contrary to the elevation he witnessed in South America. Recent work has broadened Darwin's motivations to the day-to-day af...

The feminization of nature is a familiar story to historians of science. In The Death of Nature, for instance, Carolyn Merchant famously argued that nature’s presumed femininity acted first to restrain then to justify exploitative practices like mining in early modern Europe. Less well known...

In the period following WWII, ideology critique was often characterized as a science. The French philosopher Louis Althusser epitomized this stance, updating Marx's theories to analyze the growing tertiary economy in Europe. In social theory, literary criticism, and philosophy, "historical materiali...

 In place-based science, location is key to scientific inquiry.  Thus, place-based science expands the focus from the rituals of laboratory practices within a laboratory to the actual placement of research in a landscape, on parcels of land often controlled by governmental or corporate entities. �...