Abstracts Archive

Psychographic profiling of millions of Facebook users by data firm Cambridge Analytica is a watershed event in the history of digital technology’s social impact -- the moment when the co-development of the psychological and computational sciences became a matter of public concern. Through the appl...

In the 1980s, three neurologists from Boston and Glasgow proposed that brain laterality and numerous human ‘abnormalities’ might have a shared hormonal cause. Norman Geschwind (1926–1984) and colleagues suggested that fetal testosterone regulates brain asymmetry and impacts other characteristi...

Ecology is in principle tied to evolution, since communities and ecosystems result from evolution, while ecological conditions in turn determine fitness values, hence evolution. Yet, as disciplines, evolution and ecology were not unified along the 20th century. The Modern Synthesis intended to inves...

In 1967, Clara Claiborne Park published The Siege: The First Eight Years of an Autistic Child, her memoir tracing the experiences of symptoms, diagnosis, treatments, uncertainty, and advocacy that became the dominant narrative of parenting a child with autism. The Siege initiated the genre of parent...

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...

  While Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine represent two very distinct practices of medicine, thousands of years of cultural and economic exchange have led to numerous exchanges and overlap of theory, treatment modalities, and use of pharmacological substances.  By looking closely ...

A “silver curtain” of secrecy separated Eastman Kodak’s photographic emulsion researchers from their co-workers and professional colleagues in the Cold War United States. As the popularity of this metaphor among Kodak’s laboratory workers suggests, the firm’s concern about divulging insigh...

One of the rare instances in which chemistry has been present in the “big picture” discussions of the history of science is John Pickstone’s emphasis on the role of Lavoisierian chemistry in the establishment of analysis as a way of knowing. I have previously tried to build on Pickstone’s wo...

 John MacEachran was the only Canadian student to complete a Ph.D. under Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig. Although Wundt is considered the nominal founder of experimental psychology, MacEachran completed a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1909. MacEachran could probably have obtained a position at any number of pro...

Contemporary forensic science has achieved unprecedented visibility as a uniquely compelling example of applied expertise. Dominated by new laboratory-based techniques, practitioners and the public they serve live in an apparent era of forensic infallibility, characterised by precision methodologies...

As scientific objects and practices acquired a privileged status within the history of science, the field's relationship with the neighbouring disciplines of history of ideas and intellectual history has become more strained. In recent years, several of its most prominent practitioners have encourag...

By the 1920s, comparative psychology would have hardly been recognizable to the naturalists who had filled its ranks a generation prior. In fewer than thirty years, it had transitioned from an area dominated by field observations, case studies, and at-home experiments to one consisting of lab wo...

Despite earlier experimentation with X-Ray technology applied to paintings in German science laboratories, it was only in the 1920s and 1930s that the technology became more widely and systematically applied to art. Alan Burrough’s acquisition of the first and extensive archive of X-ray images of ...

One of our favorite ways to improve as teachers is to talk to great teachers to hear about what they do in the classroom and how they think about it. That’s just the kind of conversation we hope to engender in this roundtable. Four teachers will get the dialog started by sharing their experiences...

The nineteenth-century communications revolution witnessed Islamic rulers eagerly adopt new technologies en masse. A curious outlier to this was the Afghan ruler Amir Sher Ali (r. 1863-78). Rather than adopt the communications revolution in toto, he adopted the postal system, printing press, and pho...

Scientific knowledge is customarily understood as a product of value-neutral observation, and its transmission as a straightforward process of diffusion. In recent years, historians of science have come increasingly to recognize the creation and communication of science as invariably complex process...

While the recent Lava Jato financial crisis and impeachment of ex-president Dilma Rousseff have resulted in widespread repercussions across Brazil, this string of national events has been absorbed with a decolonial view that approaches these events as the latest wave in a series of violent oscillati...

William Stanley Jevons (1835 – 1882) is no stranger to historians of 19th-century economics. Jevons's contributions to economics have been widely discussed including, but not limited to, a systematic overview of his economic writings (Peart, 1996), his use of mathematics (Schabas, 1990), to what e...

Research on the Chinese language, as opposed to practically-oriented language study, constituted an essential aspect of academic sinology as it developed in Europe in the nineteenth century. In 1814, Joshua Marshman published a book on the Chinese language with the intention to systematically descri...

This paper explores African American ideas and concerns about reproductive health in the early twentieth century. African Americans – as parents, physicians, and intellectuals – debated the best ways to bear and raise healthy black children at a time when eugenic campaigns and public health init...

This roundtable is based on the contention that the history of biology stands to benefit from active collaborations with life scientists. Historians of chemistry and molecular biology have advanced similar views in recent years, incorporating both experimental reconstructions and ethnographies into ...

In the United States during the early twentieth century, liberal Protestant scientists and theologians were heavily influenced by Andrew Dickson White’s conflict thesis.  Owing to White’s famous two-volume book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), they d...

In 1856, twelve babies were born on Canebrake Plantation in Adams County, Mississippi: six boys and six girls. The first, Kate, arrived on January 21, born to Beck, age thirty. The last came just before the New Year—Jenny, born to Susan, age twenty-three, on December 29. One, a baby girl born to P...

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...

Throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, scientists and conservators at a select number of cultural institutions worked towards developing a more accurate understanding of the techniques and materials used by Old Master painters. Some of the first pioneers in this area include A.P. Laurie based in Edinbu...

From 1945 to the present, scientists, technicians, and diplomats in Argentina and Brazil have been among the developing world’s vanguard in harnessing the promise and power of nuclear energy technologies. The Atomic Age created a wholly new set of criteria of modernity to which a nation’s leader...

‘Scientific internationalism’ in the ideals and practices of the physical sciences has become a crucial object of analysis to better understand the history of Cold War science. While the number of international scientific collaborations experienced a dramatic growth from the end of World War II ...

When stationed in Manila, the Jesuit pharmacist and missionary Georg Joseph Kamel (1661-1706) produced extensive accounts about Philippine flora, which were later printed in Europe. Drawing on the example of the St Ignatius bean, a medicinal plant native to the Philippines monopolised by the Jesuit ...

My starting point is Jöns Jacob Berzelius, prominent chemist as well as founder, editor, and reformer of a number of scientific periodicals. In his roles as editor, he corresponded extensively with editors of other journals, he gained access to these journals, and he made his views on chemical and ...

In early April of 1602, Kepler took what was to prove a fateful step in working out his Mars theory. He had already formulated a prototype of the “area law,” which we now know as his Second Law. This, he thought, would be a more accurate replacement for Ptolemy’s equant, which he saw as a stan...