Throughout the late nineteenth century, the British established observatories, meteorological posts, and stations across their burgeoning empire. These institutions and their networks were part of a global endeavor to map and understand the weather by collating vast quantities of data, and, it has been argued, they were also emblematic of imperial prowess and reach. In the Straits Settlements, however, unlike almost every other British colony, observatories came and went, and meteorology lacked central coordination and funding. This essay explores the reasons behind this erratic and often elusive meteorological provision and interest. It argues that contemporary perceptions of the Straits Settlements climate as stable and lacking in seasonality or extremes led to a lack of interest in meteorology at local and international levels. This resulted in a bureaucratic disinclination to invest in the science, despite its major value to agricultural productivity, the linchpin of the economy. In so doing, this study interrogates the absence of formal provision or structure, focusing instead on the diluted mechanisms and sites that kept a meteorological narrative alive until its formal institutionalization in Singapore in 1929.
{"title":"An Ocean Apart: Meteorology and the Elusive Observatories of British Malaya","authors":"Fiona Williamson","doi":"10.1086/727680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727680","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the late nineteenth century, the British established observatories, meteorological posts, and stations across their burgeoning empire. These institutions and their networks were part of a global endeavor to map and understand the weather by collating vast quantities of data, and, it has been argued, they were also emblematic of imperial prowess and reach. In the Straits Settlements, however, unlike almost every other British colony, observatories came and went, and meteorology lacked central coordination and funding. This essay explores the reasons behind this erratic and often elusive meteorological provision and interest. It argues that contemporary perceptions of the Straits Settlements climate as stable and lacking in seasonality or extremes led to a lack of interest in meteorology at local and international levels. This resulted in a bureaucratic disinclination to invest in the science, despite its major value to agricultural productivity, the linchpin of the economy. In so doing, this study interrogates the absence of formal provision or structure, focusing instead on the diluted mechanisms and sites that kept a meteorological narrative alive until its formal institutionalization in Singapore in 1929.","PeriodicalId":14667,"journal":{"name":"Isis","volume":"60 ","pages":"710 - 724"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139017108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay explores the use of stringed instruments (and in particular the harpsichord) as models of brain and cognitive function in eighteenth-century French medicine and natural philosophy. These comparisons were founded in part on the anatomical investigations of the latter half of the seventeenth century, which had established both the “fibrous” structure of the white and gray matter of the cerebrum and the vibratory movement the brain underwent in the performance of its functions. Musical instruments—and in particular the harpsichord—helped these philosophers speculate about how the brain worked as the material instrument of sensation and thought: they were machines at once mechanical and affective, grounded in the materiality of their wooden boards and metal strings, yet symbolizing the rational—and immaterial—harmonies of music.
{"title":"The Harpsichord Brain: Instrumental Models of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century France","authors":"Edward Halley Barnet","doi":"10.1086/727681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727681","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the use of stringed instruments (and in particular the harpsichord) as models of brain and cognitive function in eighteenth-century French medicine and natural philosophy. These comparisons were founded in part on the anatomical investigations of the latter half of the seventeenth century, which had established both the “fibrous” structure of the white and gray matter of the cerebrum and the vibratory movement the brain underwent in the performance of its functions. Musical instruments—and in particular the harpsichord—helped these philosophers speculate about how the brain worked as the material instrument of sensation and thought: they were machines at once mechanical and affective, grounded in the materiality of their wooden boards and metal strings, yet symbolizing the rational—and immaterial—harmonies of music.","PeriodicalId":14667,"journal":{"name":"Isis","volume":"8 11","pages":"769 - 790"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139023770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the 1920s, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History led by Roy Chapman Andrews exported a large collection of valuable fossils from the Gobi Desert. While their expedition was celebrated across Europe and the United States, it aroused enormous controversy in China and Mongolia, especially after a new Nationalist government was formed in Nanjing during the late 1920s. Whereas Chinese scholars accused American scientists of plundering their natural heritage, Andrews argued that because dinosaurs went extinct long before the creation of China, prehistoric fossils belonged equally to all mankind. This essay locates the Central Asiatic Expedition within a broader history of epistemic imperialism to explore what the controversy that it engendered reveals about the production, circulation, and accumulation of knowledge in a global context.
{"title":"Locating the Central Asiatic Expedition: Epistemic Imperialism in Vertebrate Paleontology","authors":"Lukas Rieppel, Yu-chi Chang","doi":"10.1086/727563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727563","url":null,"abstract":"During the 1920s, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History led by Roy Chapman Andrews exported a large collection of valuable fossils from the Gobi Desert. While their expedition was celebrated across Europe and the United States, it aroused enormous controversy in China and Mongolia, especially after a new Nationalist government was formed in Nanjing during the late 1920s. Whereas Chinese scholars accused American scientists of plundering their natural heritage, Andrews argued that because dinosaurs went extinct long before the creation of China, prehistoric fossils belonged equally to all mankind. This essay locates the Central Asiatic Expedition within a broader history of epistemic imperialism to explore what the controversy that it engendered reveals about the production, circulation, and accumulation of knowledge in a global context.","PeriodicalId":14667,"journal":{"name":"Isis","volume":"447 ","pages":"725 - 746"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139026176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This introduction to the Focus section “Let’s Get to Work: Bringing Labor History and the History of Science Together” considers the need for and implications of a labor history of science. What would the broad contours of such an approach be? And what new insights, into both the past and the present, could be revealed? The contributions to this Focus section show how a labor history of science broadens our understanding of the practice and practitioners of science. They also use these historical narratives recursively, to reflect on the practice of doing history of science. And they suggest that we come up short in our obligations to the labor of our field’s past and present. This introduction offers a brief overview of the points of intersection between the fields of labor history and history of science and indicates where these intersections might be more profitably developed.
{"title":"Introduction: Launching a Labor History of Science","authors":"Alexandra Hui, Lissa L. Roberts, Seth Rockman","doi":"10.1086/727646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727646","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction to the Focus section “Let’s Get to Work: Bringing Labor History and the History of Science Together” considers the need for and implications of a labor history of science. What would the broad contours of such an approach be? And what new insights, into both the past and the present, could be revealed? The contributions to this Focus section show how a labor history of science broadens our understanding of the practice and practitioners of science. They also use these historical narratives recursively, to reflect on the practice of doing history of science. And they suggest that we come up short in our obligations to the labor of our field’s past and present. This introduction offers a brief overview of the points of intersection between the fields of labor history and history of science and indicates where these intersections might be more profitably developed.","PeriodicalId":14667,"journal":{"name":"Isis","volume":"174 10","pages":"817 - 826"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139014047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since around 2010, a workers’ history of science has emerged as a distinct set of research questions and professional practices. More than a consolidation of prior concepts, the workers’ history of science attends to resource distribution both in sites of science in the past and in present-day historians’ sites of training and labor—the university, the library, the research organization, the professional meeting, and more. To understand the timing and trajectory of the workers’ history of science, it is helpful to look at the history of “mutual aid.” This example clarifies, first, how the workers’ history of science is enlivening the historiography of science: by bringing to the past a form of analysis that was actively politically suppressed in the workplaces of history in the United States after World War II. It also shows how the workers’ history of science can, in alliance with other movements, gradually transform the political economy of the profession—through small but consequential decisions about how to organize our shared professional worlds.
{"title":"Mutual Aid: The Workers’ History of Science","authors":"Laura Stark","doi":"10.1086/727645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727645","url":null,"abstract":"Since around 2010, a workers’ history of science has emerged as a distinct set of research questions and professional practices. More than a consolidation of prior concepts, the workers’ history of science attends to resource distribution both in sites of science in the past and in present-day historians’ sites of training and labor—the university, the library, the research organization, the professional meeting, and more. To understand the timing and trajectory of the workers’ history of science, it is helpful to look at the history of “mutual aid.” This example clarifies, first, how the workers’ history of science is enlivening the historiography of science: by bringing to the past a form of analysis that was actively politically suppressed in the workplaces of history in the United States after World War II. It also shows how the workers’ history of science can, in alliance with other movements, gradually transform the political economy of the profession—through small but consequential decisions about how to organize our shared professional worlds.","PeriodicalId":14667,"journal":{"name":"Isis","volume":"363 ","pages":"841 - 849"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139018472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Examining how, and to what effect, the phrase “truly international” became central to the rhetoric and organization of the American-hosted 1950 International Congress of Mathematicians, this essay traces the negotiation of a “truly international” discipline from mathematicians’ first international congresses around the turn of the century across two world wars and their divisive interlude. Two failed attempts to host international congresses of mathematicians in the United States, for 1924 and 1940, defined the stakes for those who became the principal organizers for 1950. Combining American organizational records with contexts and sources that extend across and beyond traditional mathematical centers in Europe and North America, the essay shows how a small cohort of American mathematicians marshaled an emphatic but ambiguous “international” rhetoric to guide policies and command cooperation and support while responding to persistent challenges. Their adaptations and compromises left a lasting mark on the terms and achievements of international inclusion, cooperation, and hegemony in mathematics.
{"title":"A “Truly International” Discipline: Adverbs, Ideals, and the Reinvention of International Mathematics, 1920–1950","authors":"Michael J. Barany","doi":"10.1086/727706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727706","url":null,"abstract":"Examining how, and to what effect, the phrase “truly international” became central to the rhetoric and organization of the American-hosted 1950 International Congress of Mathematicians, this essay traces the negotiation of a “truly international” discipline from mathematicians’ first international congresses around the turn of the century across two world wars and their divisive interlude. Two failed attempts to host international congresses of mathematicians in the United States, for 1924 and 1940, defined the stakes for those who became the principal organizers for 1950. Combining American organizational records with contexts and sources that extend across and beyond traditional mathematical centers in Europe and North America, the essay shows how a small cohort of American mathematicians marshaled an emphatic but ambiguous “international” rhetoric to guide policies and command cooperation and support while responding to persistent challenges. Their adaptations and compromises left a lasting mark on the terms and achievements of international inclusion, cooperation, and hegemony in mathematics.","PeriodicalId":14667,"journal":{"name":"Isis","volume":"261 1","pages":"791 - 816"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138991242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eloge: Garland Edward Allen III (1936–2023): An Idiosyncratic, Dialectical Multilogue","authors":"Nathaniel Comfort","doi":"10.1086/727678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727678","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":14667,"journal":{"name":"Isis","volume":"11 6","pages":"850 - 856"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139015210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The historiography of pandemics and inequality can be characterized by two distinct but often overlapping traditions. One centers structural and political analysis, the other a race-critical approach to the production of human difference. This bibliographic essay reviews historical scholarship in these traditions spanning the past hundred years, with a focus on Anglophone literature in the history of medicine in the United States over the past half century. Early writing on the history of epidemics celebrated the conquest of disease through the application of laboratory research. Insights from social history and environmental history came to inform new analyses of epidemic inequalities, drawing questions of race, class, and empire into the frame during the 1960s and 1970s. The AIDS pandemic of the 1980s further oriented scholarship toward reckoning with stigma, identity, and human experiences of inequality while also troubling the relationship between medicine and the state. In more recent decades, the scholarship on race, social inequality, and pandemics has become deep and broad, remedying longstanding biases toward elite scientific actors and the metropolitan centers of Europe and the East Coast of the United States. In expanding their vision, historians also have engaged in more nuanced analyses of racialization as a social, environmental, and ideological process of embodying difference. Further, where earlier scholarship often relied on mortality data, there has been growing awareness of how numbers shape narratives and are shaped by them in turn. In its conclusion, the essay highlights emerging themes in race and inequality with particular attention to themes that have become prominent amid the global devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
{"title":"Epidemic Inequities: Social and Racial Inequality in the History of Pandemics","authors":"Michael F. McGovern, Keith A. Wailoo","doi":"10.1086/726986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726986","url":null,"abstract":"The historiography of pandemics and inequality can be characterized by two distinct but often overlapping traditions. One centers structural and political analysis, the other a race-critical approach to the production of human difference. This bibliographic essay reviews historical scholarship in these traditions spanning the past hundred years, with a focus on Anglophone literature in the history of medicine in the United States over the past half century. Early writing on the history of epidemics celebrated the conquest of disease through the application of laboratory research. Insights from social history and environmental history came to inform new analyses of epidemic inequalities, drawing questions of race, class, and empire into the frame during the 1960s and 1970s. The AIDS pandemic of the 1980s further oriented scholarship toward reckoning with stigma, identity, and human experiences of inequality while also troubling the relationship between medicine and the state. In more recent decades, the scholarship on race, social inequality, and pandemics has become deep and broad, remedying longstanding biases toward elite scientific actors and the metropolitan centers of Europe and the East Coast of the United States. In expanding their vision, historians also have engaged in more nuanced analyses of racialization as a social, environmental, and ideological process of embodying difference. Further, where earlier scholarship often relied on mortality data, there has been growing awareness of how numbers shape narratives and are shaped by them in turn. In its conclusion, the essay highlights emerging themes in race and inequality with particular attention to themes that have become prominent amid the global devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.","PeriodicalId":14667,"journal":{"name":"Isis","volume":"36 Suppl 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134969452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}