It is a historiographical orthodoxy that the 18th century witnessed the rise of a historical consciousness, partly in response to what Hazard called the crisis of the European mind. Within this rise, we can identify a particular historical sub-genre: that of History of Learning. This ‘historia litteraria’ marks the beginning of History of Science. It is by now a well known albeit still understudied phenomenon, prevalent in Germany from the late 17th century onwards. I will show how, within this historiographical tradition, which takes its cue from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, the emphasis shifted from the remote to the more recent past. The 18th-c. history of recent learning points at a growing self-awareness of the Republic of Letters as a social phenomenon, noticeable also from the rise of the scientific journal, editions of complete works of recent scientist and scholars, the posthumous editions of letters, and table-talks and the expanding scholarly apparatuses accompanying these editions. The scientific and scholarly community started to assert its own independence from state and church, and retroactively projected their own enlightened ideals back onto the earlier history of the Republic of Letters. This is causing the modern historian considerable problems: we are still reading the 16th- and 17th-c. socio-cultural history of learning through the prism of Newton, Bayle and Voltaire and fail to appreciate the variegated history of the deceptively stable term ‘Republic of Letters’, which in fact experienced many ups and downs through time and across space.

The historical narratives on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry granted to the Baltic-German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932) hardly address the strong support Ostwald received nor the reasons presented in their nomination letters. Considering to be relevant presenting the reasons behind Ostwald’s prize, in this work we present and discuss the nomination letters sent in Ostwald’s favor in Nobel Prize editions between 1904 and 1909. Analysing these letters and dialoguing with the literature, we argue that, for Ostwald’s supporters, his most relevant achievements concerned his extra-laboratorial activities, namely his role as a teacher and organizer of chemical science. We will also attempt to demystify some frequent discourses on Ostwald’s nomination, such as the negative influence of his antiatomist posture and the central role of catalysis for his nomination.

This paper will explore the huge and highly influential natural history media output, including television, radio, encyclopedias and comics, as well as contributions to the mainstream press and scientific journals, by Felix Rodríguez de la Fuente (1928-1980), a pioneering and highly influential naturalist, activist and natural history author and broadcaster in turbulent 1960s and 1970s Spain. Specifically, it will focus on how he blended the portrayal of local wildlife with the depiction of scientific and media practices, and how he played these elements together, in a very successful feedback loop across different platforms and formats, to actively engage audiences in naturalist-like (scientific, activist) practices in their everyday-life endeavors. This study, situated in the last years of Franco’s regime in Spain, such a noticeably changing context regarding politics, the natural sciences, the public perception of animals at large, and media, will allow us to discuss historically the relationship between natural history media and educational content, and will thus contribute to the understanding of key features of contemporary, media-driven science communication.

The staff of the Science Museum in the Second World War years were faced with a dilemma. With its first purpose-built building opened in 1928, only two decades later they already felt their displays to be very old-fashioned. The galleries devoted to evolutionary sequences of technologies divided by textbook divisions – such as optics, acoustics, mechanical engineering and the rest – felt to many of them to be tired, lacking the modernity and sophistication of Paris’s Palais de la Decouverte, opened in 1937. When the independently produced science exhibition of the Festival of Britain, itself an exemplification of the Parisian style, opened on a site behind the Museum in 1951, the contrast was sorely felt. At stake was whether to exhibit scientific principles in the modern style, or whether to display assemblages of historical objects. In other words, the temporary 1951 exhibition made evident an immanent distinction between exhibiting science and exhibiting its history. Into this ferment stepped 1950’s new director, Frank Sherwood Taylor, the only historian-director the institution has known. In this paper I explore some of Sherwood Taylor’s responses to the Museum’s postwar dilemma over history and propose an interpretation of how he squared the circle of contemporary versus historical approaches to science.