Abstracts Archive

This paper explores a 1925 meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, during which the British colonial administrations of eastern Africa agreed upon the dialectical basis for Standard Swahili. If examined from the standpoint of the 1920s, this decision seems a typical story of imperial appropriation and...

During the eighteenth-century, the Spanish Empire held a virtual monopoly on the production of cochineal, a lucrative red dye commodity sourced from insects grown on cacti largely in the south of modern day Mexico. The cochineal insect had been domesticated and grown by the indigenous peoples of cen...

History of science education remains a marginalized topic, if not a neglected one, or is seen as a separate discipline apart from the history of science. This is despite the fact that science teaching and learning at all levels from primary education to university constitutes a substantial portion o...

This paper studies conceptions of Indigenous knowledge-based material practice in the trade, production and use of wild silk within a posthumanist theoretical framework (Barad 2007). By focusing on actual conceptions of its material and symbolic agency, affinities and affordances, it inquires about ...

At the turn of the nineteenth century in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, public and private secondary and higher schools, both confessional and secular, began to acquire scientific teaching objects on a regular basis in support of modern science education. Not only did these many objects function a...

Historians of the Space Age have pointed to the importance of space popularization, including the work of space illustrators like Chesley Bonestell and his contemporary science fiction authors and filmmakers, in selling a space future to the American public. But what was this future, and who was all...

National statistical agencies institutionalized the collection and publication of data, as well as its representation in increasingly sophisticated models, in the early 20th century. These new kinds of knowledge came to define modern quantitative social science. With them, researchers hoped to measu...

Anthropologists studying American Indians groups in the 1880s and 1890s occasionally remarked on community sects dedicated to the consumption of peyote (Lophophora williamsii) for spiritual purposes. These “peyote cults,” which spread from Mexico into the central US in the late nineteenth centur...

Established in 1834 for the collection of facts, the Statistical Society of London (SSL) played a central role in the moulding of statistical facts. The SSL defined statistical facts as the aggregation of numerous observations and reduced the value of single observations to isolated facts that alone...

Several experiments from the history of physics were adapted for teaching purposes – most of them originate from the long nineteenth century. These references to historical experiments can be found both in school teaching as well as in university lectures. Most of these experiments were introduced...

At the end of World War I, when the idea of a “world economy” took shape, economists on both sides of the Atlantic embraced the dream of establishing an economic world barometer. The seemingly mechanical working of new forecasting instruments seemed to allow for that dream to become reality. Thi...

This article analyses the intellectual legacy of the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA) from Mozambique ‘socialist period (1976-1990), in the scientific work of the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos (IESE), a private research institution founded in 2007. The article argues that to fully gr...

During the height of the Cold War, the future as an object of scientific inquiry gained traction among both Western and Eastern nations, resulting in new fields such as future studies. Yet future studies was a motley field with a variety of techniques, conceptions of the future, and political vision...

This talk highlights the relevance of gender in American and European accounts of identity development in the latter half of the twentieth century. Going beyond existing analyses by Carol Gilligan and other relational psychologists, feminist social scientists and writers, who have read dominant theo...

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo-American anthropologists conducted field expeditions to disparate regions. Some of these anthropologists contributed to the social reform efforts of a trans-Atlantic community of Progressive experts. Within this highly populated landsca...

In the 1930s two studies were published by the League of Nations which both had a large influence on the development of economics. The first was a report on the theories of the business cycle by Gottfried von Haberler, the second one a statistical test of the various theories of the business cycle b...

This paper will explore Russo-American knowledge exchange in the context of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1900-1902). This expedition was organised by the famous American anthropologist Franz Boas, and funded by the president of the American Natural History Museum, Morris K. Jesup. It involved...

Since the establishment of the laws of thermodynamics, the allocation and efficient use of energy resources has not only been a major topic for the physical labor of man and machine. Around 1900, the efficient use of energetic resources presented an equally important issue for establishing technique...

My talk surveys issues coincidental to the introduction of the Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree at nineteenth-century American Catholic institutions of higher education. Starting with Santa Clara College, a Jesuit school in California that conferred a B.S. degree in 1859 and continuing to 1900 (and...

The mathematical model of the U.S. business cycle that Jan Tinbergen and other economists employed by the League of Nations developed from 1936 to 1938 was arguably the first scientific representation of a national economy. This paper examines the relationship between this seminal model and diplomat...