Abstracts Archive

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...

In recent years, thanks to scholarship from Wolff, Mancini, Bauer, and others, the sexologist and gay rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld has returned from obscurity to claim a place at the forefront of European LGBT history. But, with the major exception of Sengoopta’s work, Hirschfeld is less prom...

For more than two hundred years after the origin of the learned journal, the modes of scholarly communication remained highly diverse. Only in the later nineteenth century did the scientific paper achieve privileged status. It took another half century before the formats and uses of scientific journ...

Historians traditionally trace the quantification of physics to the period 1780–1830, during which time many quantitative physical concepts, such as latent heat or electrical capacity, were invented and operationalized. I identify and characterize a subsequent “Second Quantification” during th...

The paper traces a debate about species transmutation that unfolded in agricultural periodicals published in the Northeastern United States between 1820 and 1859. During the nineteenth century, numerous members of New England farming communities believed that particular environmental conditions coul...

The common tale about the “chemical revolution” in psychiatry is that it begins with the introduction of neuroleptics in the 1950s. The latter led, as most historians argue, to the dismantling of mental asylums: patients suffering from mental illnesses were increasingly treated as out-patients. ...

Manuscripts of medical texts composed in medieval and early modern South Asia frequently included glossaries (“farhang”) of technical terminology. These were structured around entries for disease categories in Arabic, with translations in Persian and "hindī" (vernacular South Asian languages). ...

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...

The idealized representation of geological strata is one of the most striking aspects of late fifteenth-century Italian pictorial landscapes. Yet medieval learned “meteorology”, which also included today’s geology and mineralogy, largely ignored this highly visible feature of the Earth’s sur...

As is well known in the history of mathematics, the path to the invention of calculus in late seventeenth-century Europe passed through Buonaventura Cavalieri’s geometry of “indivisibles,” the infinitesimally small slices into which he proposed dividing geometric figures in order to compute th...

This paper will examine an oft-overlooked development in the history of twentieth-century biology: the rise of bioenergetics, or the study of energy transformations in living organisms. Through a case study of the work of biochemist Fritz Albert Lipmann and his associates, this paper will describe t...

This paper will examine sixteenth-century physicians’ attempts to portray contrived tests of poison antidotes as a learned endeavor. Poison trials had long been used by charlatans and other empirics, who hawked their nostrums in marketplace shows that involved self-poisoning and poisoning animals....

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the first researches in Physics held at the University of São Paulo (USP), an institution that would become a reference in Brazil. Three important dimensions that characterize the episode are considered: i) The Sociopolitical Context: São Paulo's politi...

After the discovery of X rays and radioactive elements in the turn of the 19th century, the deleterious health effects of radiation were greatly ignored. Most experiments regarding the physiological effects of radiation were about the possibilities of their therapeutic use. Radiation widespread appl...

Who defines the terms of American public discussion over science issues such as nuclear policy, healthcare, and climate change? Exploring the conflicts between presidential Science Advisors and the Union of Concerned Scientists between 1969 and 2008 provides a window into this question. During the N...

This paper attempts to reconstruct the political economy of data in eighteenth century mathematics and astronomy. I argue the construction of Hindu cosmology in late eighteenth century Orientalist discourse was a product of practical efforts, like surveying and astronomical observation. In, 1784, Th...

The 1874 edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology was written, like other such protocols of the nineteenth century, “to promote accurate anthropological observation on the part of travelers,” enabling those who were not “anthropologists themselves to supply the information…wanted for the...

Examining the recipes of Noël Vallant (1632–1685), private physician of Parisian nobility, this paper focuses on non-European substances used in medical therapies in seventeenth-century France. The question of what happened to ‘exotic’ remedies entering the European market has been previously...

Before 1332 in Paris, John of Genoa elaborated an original table of Lunar and Solar hourly velocities combined with a table of the radii of the Sun, the Moon and the shadow of the earth, including a column for the variation of the shadow of the earth – variatio umbre – used as a function of the ...

During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the calculating techniques described by the canons found in the Alfonsine Tables became a topic of general epistemological interest at the University of Paris and other major centers of learning in Latin Europe. Scholars and ecclesiastical ad...

The passing of the Society Editorship from Utrecht to Mississippi State University presents an opportunity for those overseeing HSS publications to discuss their work with members, and to highlight the range of ways that members of every career stage and specialization can participate in the publica...

After Galileo’s remarkable demonstration of the rugged surface of the moon, several attempts to provide a comprehensive cartography were conducted, culminating with Johannes Hevelius’s lavish Selenographia (1647). By representing each phase of the moon, Hevelius did not only intend to give an ac...

The aim of this paper is to provide a contribution to the historiographic agenda regarding the idea of the circulation of knowledge, the Global History of Knowledge and the debate surrounding scientific 'centres' and 'peripheries' (1, 2). We examine the University of Coimbra Laboratory of Experiment...

Eighteenth-century France was marked by distinctly “odored” phenomena. The rise of industry led to the emission of mephitic aerial pollutants while disease outbreaks caused an overcrowding of hospitals, which became noxious institutions in many cities. These smelly realities and the anxieties th...

In the twentieth century, the proliferation of synthetic chemicals prompted US and European governments to introduce regulatory regimes for the control of chemicals. It was especially consumers’ concerns about artificial food additives and synthetic pesticides that inspired environmentalism and pr...

This paper explores the material conditions under which two English artists, John Abbot and John William Lewin, produced magnificent entomological drawings in foreign settings. In the 1770s Abbot travelled to southeastern backwoods of North America and Lewin travelled in the 1790s to Australia. Alth...

The constellations pictured in the manuscripts commissioned by ‘Alfonso X el Sabio’ (Lapidario, El Escorial, RBME, Ms. h-I-15, Libro del saber de astrología, Madrid, UCM BH, Ms. 156, Libro de astromagia, Città del Vaticano, BAV, Ms. Reg. Lat. 1283a) stem from the figurative cycle illustrating ...

This talk centers on the “African Horse Sickness” that plagued the Middle East for the first time in 1944, resulting in the termination of thousands of animal lives. In that context, equines were cardinal to agricultural work and economy, to connecting rural and urban areas as transporters of go...

In recent decades mean sea level has become the almost unavoidable reference point of an impending environmental cataclysm. Before that it had been naturalized as the most common, almost intuitive vertical datum. The idea to neatly conceptualize the vertical boundary between land and sea as an avera...

Handbooks and manuals are where the knowledge and practices of a discipline accumulate. In their use, professional standards can be disseminated and enforced. But even in their rejection handbooks be used to construct disciplinary boundaries. This paper offers a historical example documenting the te...