• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publications close
• AU close
• Isis close

Many historians have traced the accumulation of scientific archives via communication networks. Engines for communication in early modernity have included trade, the extrapolitical Republic of Letters, religious enthusiasm, and the centralization of large emerging information states. The communication between Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Duke Friedrich III of Gottorf-Holstein, and his key agent in England, Frederick Clodius, points to a less obvious but no less important impetus--the international negotiations of smaller states. Smaller states shaped communication networks in an international (albeit politically and religiously slanted) direction. Their networks of negotiation contributed to the internationalization of emerging science through a political and religious concept of shared interest. While interest has been central to social studies of science, interest itself has not often been historicized within the history of science. This case study demonstrates the co-production of science and society by tracing how period concepts of interest made science international.

ABSTRACTIn 1929 and 1934–1935, the physical anthropologist Harry L. Shapiro voyaged in the South Seas on the Mahina-I-Te-Pua and the Zaca, measuring mixed-race islanders, including the descendants of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island. His research in Polynesian hybridity reflects the growing cultural and scientific investment of the United States in the Pacific during this period. Shapiro's oceanic adventures and intimate encounters prompted him to discount typological speculation and emphasize instead the liberal Boasian program in physical anthropology, giving him the confidence to refigure his evaluations of racial difference. The seaborne investigatory enterprise came to influence U.S. racial thought, adding impetus to the condemnation of racism in science. On his return from the South Seas, Shapiro tried to get his fellow physical anthropologists to issue a manifesto opposing the harnessing of their science to racial discrimination and prejudice.

Isador Ladoff (1857-1918) worked briefly in the General Electric Company Research Laboratory, from 1901 to 1903. Since he was not employed to invent, Ladoff maintained that he, not the company, owned his invention of a new arc lamp electrode, eventually winning his case on appeal in 1911. The conduct and course of this patent litigation are examined in the light of Ladoff's remarkable life as a prisoner of the czar in Siberia before his escape to the United States in 1891 and as a socialist activist and writer thereafter. In showing that Ladoff's socialist principles activated his struggle with GE, the essay brings out the ironies of his defense of individualism against the incipient socialism of the laboratory supposedly espoused by officials of the company. The case is interesting in relation to the shift from the ideology, and the reality, of heroic individual invention to that of corporate invention in U.S. industrial research. That shift in turn was a crucial landmark in the longer history of the place of science in negotiation and contest about the relationship between creativity and intellectual property.

ABSTRACT This essay presents an account of W. H. Bragg’s earliest research program in Australia during the years 1904–1907: a study of the behavior of alpha particles from radioactive decay. It is suggested that problems associated with distance and isolation played a pivotal role in Bragg’s thinking and acting during this period and that his use of two “advocates,” Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, was essential to the success of the program. It is further argued that this account supports a substantial amendment of the center–periphery model of colonial science to embrace a much closer attention to place and locality; that is, it supports a polycentric model (in which the center might still be prominent).

This essay describes the emergence of "hormone" herbicides from academic plant physiology research in America in the late 1930s and 1940s, attending especially to the role of interactions between university scientists, industrial concerns, and government (particularly agricultural) agencies. The importance of an intellectual shift among the physiologists to viewing hormones as plant toxins rather than growth stimulators, spurred by wartime events, is discussed. The essay concludes by exploring the postwar marketing of these hormones as agrichemicals and as lawn treatments for suburban consumers, placing these in the economic and ecological context of other contemporary developments in farming technique.

From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeenth century curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice. Curious individuals were considered to be proud and "puffed up," and the objects of their investigations were deemed illicit, dispute engendering, unknowable, or useless. Seventeenth-century projects for the advancement of learning had to distance themselves from curiosity and its dubious fruits or, alternatively, enhance the moral status of the curious sensibility. Francis Bacon's proposals for the instauration of knowledge were an integral part of a process by which curiosity underwent a remarkable transformation from vice to virtue over the course of the seventeenth century. The changing fortunes of this human propensity highlight the morally charged nature of early modern debates over the status of natural philosophy and the particular virtues required of its practitioners. The rehabilitation of curiosity was a crucial element in the objectification of scientific knowledge and led to a gradual shift of focus away from the moral qualities of investigators and the propriety of particular objects of knowledge to specific procedures and methods.

A partir d'ossements de differents musees, Richard Owen a bati tout un programme de recherche homologique en biologie, theorie ou les structures organiques sont determinees principalement par leur aspect morphologique