Abstracts Archive

The United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) owed much of its realisation to the advocacy of Jeremiah Reynolds, a former newspaper man and public lecturer. His strongest case for the necessity of Pacific exploration were New England whalers who were said to cruise unexplored parts of the ocean...

Since the publication of the paper “On lines and planes of closest fit to systems of points in space” by Karl Pearson in 1918 principal component analysis (PCA) has become an important statistical method in multiple research fields from the natural sciences (i.e. archeology, atmospheric sciences...

Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s portfolio of fifteen large-scale chromolithographic prints, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons to accompany Trouvelot’s Astronomical Drawings Manual (1882), were among the most influential and innovative images of astronomical phenomena produced at the end of th...

As the Spanish Empire grew and society stabilized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European agents transposed both their breeding practices and zoological language to organize proliferating human difference. Amidst the hubris of imagining how breeding could create a more perfect society, ...

Biography appeals to historians of science again, but perhaps not in a form that most biographers would recognize. There are now biographies of animals, of inanimate objects and of concepts, of institutions, of landscapes. This flourishing of biographies in recent decades can be seen as our discipli...

It has been a matter of debate among historians of science whether “race” disappeared as a category in the biological sciences with the evolutionary synthesis and rise of population genetics. It has become commonplace among philosophers of science to refer to a “race debate” currently underw...

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...

The recurrent denial of indigenous agency and ambition in schemes of European explorations strongly suggests the need to overcome the myth of western solitary travellers by taking a new and multi-perspective look at the inner life of expeditions. This paper analyses significant facets of the program...

Early nineteenth-century discoveries of rare and new plants by artisans in the north of England brought learned botanists to this relatively unknown region of Britain. However, travelling to the areas in which particular plants were known to have been found did not ensure that the desire of visiting...

Descartes several times wrote that the aim of his philosophy was to provide an understanding of medicine so as to improve human life. Why, then, did he hold back his full views about the subject? Could they have been dangerous? Descartes composed a manuscript on human physiology but held it back. On...

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mathematical sciences played an increasingly important role in Western societies. Most historical accounts try to understand how the study of nature came to use mathematical methods and how mathematical concepts and tool became the standard tool for schola...