Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1017/S0007087421000534
Lea Beiermann
In the 1870s, microscopy societies began to proliferate in the United States. Most of these societies attracted microscopists from surrounding cities, but the American Postal Microscopical Club, modelled on the British Postal Microscopical Society, used the postal system to connect microscopists scattered across the country. Club members exchanged microscope slides and notes following a chain-letter system. The main objective of the club was to teach its members how to make permanent slides. Preparation and mounting methods required technical skill, which was, as even club members had to admit, difficult to learn without personal instruction. Yet members developed ways to share craft knowledge through the post. Drawing on the private notes of a member and published reports on the slides circulated, this paper challenges the widespread assumption that the generation of craft knowledge depended on the co-location of artisans. It argues that microscopists' knowledge of preparation methods was intertwined with their skill in building and navigating information infrastructures, and that by tracing these infrastructures we gain a better understanding of how craft knowledge travelled in the late nineteenth century.
{"title":"'A method for safe transmission': the microscope slides of the American Postal Microscopical Club.","authors":"Lea Beiermann","doi":"10.1017/S0007087421000534","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000534","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the 1870s, microscopy societies began to proliferate in the United States. Most of these societies attracted microscopists from surrounding cities, but the American Postal Microscopical Club, modelled on the British Postal Microscopical Society, used the postal system to connect microscopists scattered across the country. Club members exchanged microscope slides and notes following a chain-letter system. The main objective of the club was to teach its members how to make permanent slides. Preparation and mounting methods required technical skill, which was, as even club members had to admit, difficult to learn without personal instruction. Yet members developed ways to share craft knowledge through the post. Drawing on the private notes of a member and published reports on the slides circulated, this paper challenges the widespread assumption that the generation of craft knowledge depended on the co-location of artisans. It argues that microscopists' knowledge of preparation methods was intertwined with their skill in building and navigating information infrastructures, and that by tracing these infrastructures we gain a better understanding of how craft knowledge travelled in the late nineteenth century.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":"54 4","pages":"403-422"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0007087421000534","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39253331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1017/S0007087421000686
James W E Lowe
From the 1980s onwards, the Roslin Institute and its predecessor organizations faced budget cuts, organizational upheaval and considerable insecurity. Over the next few decades, it was transformed by the introduction of molecular biology and transgenic research, but remained a hub of animal geneticists conducting research aimed at the livestock-breeding industry. This paper explores how these animal geneticists embraced genomics in response to the many-faceted precarity that the Roslin Institute faced, establishing it as a global centre for pig genomics research through forging and leading the Pig Gene Mapping Project (PiGMaP); developing and hosting resources, such as a database for genetic linkage data; and producing associated statistical and software tools to analyse the data. The Roslin Institute leveraged these resources to play a key role in further international collaborations as a hedge against precarity. This adoption of genomics was strategically useful, as it took advantage of policy shifts at the national and European levels towards funding research with biotechnological potential. As genomics constitutes a set of infrastructures and resources with manifold uses, the development of capabilities in this domain also helped Roslin to diversify as a response to precarity.
{"title":"Adjusting to precarity: how and why the Roslin Institute forged a leading role for itself in international networks of pig genomics research.","authors":"James W E Lowe","doi":"10.1017/S0007087421000686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000686","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>From the 1980s onwards, the Roslin Institute and its predecessor organizations faced budget cuts, organizational upheaval and considerable insecurity. Over the next few decades, it was transformed by the introduction of molecular biology and transgenic research, but remained a hub of animal geneticists conducting research aimed at the livestock-breeding industry. This paper explores how these animal geneticists embraced genomics in response to the many-faceted precarity that the Roslin Institute faced, establishing it as a global centre for pig genomics research through forging and leading the Pig Gene Mapping Project (PiGMaP); developing and hosting resources, such as a database for genetic linkage data; and producing associated statistical and software tools to analyse the data. The Roslin Institute leveraged these resources to play a key role in further international collaborations as a hedge against precarity. This adoption of genomics was strategically useful, as it took advantage of policy shifts at the national and European levels towards funding research with biotechnological potential. As genomics constitutes a set of infrastructures and resources with manifold uses, the development of capabilities in this domain also helped Roslin to diversify as a response to precarity.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":"54 4","pages":"507-530"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39506703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1017/S0007087421000674
Alex Aylward
Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962) is today remembered as a giant of twentieth-century statistics, genetics and evolutionary theory. Alongside his influential scientific contributions, he was also, throughout the interwar years, a prominent figure within Britain's eugenics movement. This essay provides a close examination of his eugenical ideas and activities, focusing particularly upon his energetic advocacy of family allowances, which he hoped would boost eugenic births within the more 'desirable' middle and upper classes. Fisher's proposals, which were grounded in his distinctive explanation for the decay of civilizations throughout human history, enjoyed support from some influential figures in Britain's Eugenics Society and beyond. The ultimate failure of his campaign, though, highlights tensions both between the eugenics and family allowances movements, and within the eugenics movement itself. I show how these social and political movements represented a crucial but heretofore overlooked context for the reception of Fisher's evolutionary masterwork of 1930, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, with its notorious closing chapters on the causes and cures of national and racial decline.
罗纳德·艾尔默·费雪(Ronald Aylmer Fisher, 1890-1962)是20世纪统计学、遗传学和进化理论的巨人。除了他有影响力的科学贡献外,在两次世界大战期间,他还是英国优生学运动的杰出人物。这篇文章对他的优生学思想和活动进行了仔细的研究,特别关注他对家庭津贴的积极倡导,他希望这能在更“理想的”中上层阶级中促进优生学的产生。费雪的建议基于他对人类历史上文明衰落的独特解释,得到了英国优生学协会内外一些有影响力人物的支持。然而,他竞选的最终失败凸显了优生学和家庭津贴运动之间以及优生学运动本身内部的紧张关系。我展示了这些社会和政治运动是如何代表了一个至关重要的,但迄今为止被忽视的背景,对于接受费雪1930年的进化论巨著《自然选择的遗传理论》(the genetic Theory of Natural Selection),以及其臭名昭著的关于国家和种族衰落的原因和治疗的最后几章。
{"title":"R.A. Fisher, eugenics, and the campaign for family allowances in interwar Britain.","authors":"Alex Aylward","doi":"10.1017/S0007087421000674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000674","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962) is today remembered as a giant of twentieth-century statistics, genetics and evolutionary theory. Alongside his influential scientific contributions, he was also, throughout the interwar years, a prominent figure within Britain's eugenics movement. This essay provides a close examination of his eugenical ideas and activities, focusing particularly upon his energetic advocacy of family allowances, which he hoped would boost eugenic births within the more 'desirable' middle and upper classes. Fisher's proposals, which were grounded in his distinctive explanation for the decay of civilizations throughout human history, enjoyed support from some influential figures in Britain's Eugenics Society and beyond. The ultimate failure of his campaign, though, highlights tensions both between the eugenics and family allowances movements, and within the eugenics movement itself. I show how these social and political movements represented a crucial but heretofore overlooked context for the reception of Fisher's evolutionary masterwork of 1930, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, with its notorious closing chapters on the causes and cures of national and racial decline.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":"54 4","pages":"485-505"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39504138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1017/S0007087421000649
Edward Armston-Sheret, Kim Walker
This paper offers a new perspective on historical understandings of the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body, by studying the way that British explorers of tropical Africa drank alcohol and wrote about drink between c.1850 and c.1910. We demonstrate that alcohol was simultaneously classified as a medicinal, a preventative and a pleasurable drink, shaped by competing medical theories, but that distinctions between these different roles were highly blurred. We also show how many explorers thought certain drinks helped to protect white bodies from the effects of tropical diseases. While popular amongst travellers, these views came under growing scrutiny in the latter part of the nineteenth century, reflecting both changing scientific views about the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body and the development of a much larger European presence in tropical Africa. However, even those who opposed tropical drinking often supported the use of other stimulants and viewed the tropics as uniquely dangerous. As such, the paper challenges the idea that the late nineteenth century marked a paradigm shift in scientific attitudes towards tropical environments, as much previous scholarship has suggested. At the same time, our examinations of explorers' descriptions of drinking by African people demonstrates how ideas about racial difference played an important role within medical understandings of alcohol. Overall, this paper examines the heterogeny of attitudes to alcohol to be found within tropical medicine and documents the continuities in approach shown between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
{"title":"Is alcohol a tropical medicine? Scientific understandings of climate, stimulants and bodies in Victorian and Edwardian tropical travel.","authors":"Edward Armston-Sheret, Kim Walker","doi":"10.1017/S0007087421000649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000649","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper offers a new perspective on historical understandings of the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body, by studying the way that British explorers of tropical Africa drank alcohol and wrote about drink between c.1850 and c.1910. We demonstrate that alcohol was simultaneously classified as a medicinal, a preventative and a pleasurable drink, shaped by competing medical theories, but that distinctions between these different roles were highly blurred. We also show how many explorers thought certain drinks helped to protect white bodies from the effects of tropical diseases. While popular amongst travellers, these views came under growing scrutiny in the latter part of the nineteenth century, reflecting both changing scientific views about the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body and the development of a much larger European presence in tropical Africa. However, even those who opposed tropical drinking often supported the use of other stimulants and viewed the tropics as uniquely dangerous. As such, the paper challenges the idea that the late nineteenth century marked a paradigm shift in scientific attitudes towards tropical environments, as much previous scholarship has suggested. At the same time, our examinations of explorers' descriptions of drinking by African people demonstrates how ideas about racial difference played an important role within medical understandings of alcohol. Overall, this paper examines the heterogeny of attitudes to alcohol to be found within tropical medicine and documents the continuities in approach shown between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":"54 4","pages":"465-484"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39445028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-08DOI: 10.1017/S0007087421000637
Daniel A Stolz
When the Ottoman Empire defaulted on its public debt in 1875, British bondholders launched a campaign to win government intervention on their behalf. This article interprets the unprecedented success of this campaign as a matter of knowledge production. Mobilizing the newly established Corporation of Foreign Bondholders as a kind of 'centre of calculation', bondholders argued that they deserved assistance because of the unique size of the Ottoman default and the proportion of it that was held by British subjects. Yet neither of these numbers was easily calculated. In fact, influential bondholders worked closely with accountants and members of the Statistical Society to devise an accurate method for quantifying the Ottoman debt - and concluded that such a method did not exist. Historians of quantification and accounting have argued that the scientific status of nineteenth-century accounting depended on its disinterestedness. In the case of the Ottoman default, however, calculation was understood to be inseparable from material interest and political debate.
{"title":"'Impossible to provide an accurate estimate': the interested calculation of the Ottoman public debt, 1875-1881.","authors":"Daniel A Stolz","doi":"10.1017/S0007087421000637","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087421000637","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>When the Ottoman Empire defaulted on its public debt in 1875, British bondholders launched a campaign to win government intervention on their behalf. This article interprets the unprecedented success of this campaign as a matter of knowledge production. Mobilizing the newly established Corporation of Foreign Bondholders as a kind of 'centre of calculation', bondholders argued that they deserved assistance because of the unique size of the Ottoman default and the proportion of it that was held by British subjects. Yet neither of these numbers was easily calculated. In fact, influential bondholders worked closely with accountants and members of the Statistical Society to devise an accurate method for quantifying the Ottoman debt - and concluded that such a method did not exist. Historians of quantification and accounting have argued that the scientific status of nineteenth-century accounting depended on its disinterestedness. In the case of the Ottoman default, however, calculation was understood to be inseparable from material interest and political debate.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39497720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0007087421000236
Chi Chi Huang
This article examines the way in which the British press reported on typhoons that affected Hong Kong during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typhoons were a significant element in the narration of the British Empire, featuring frequently in British accounts of their involvements in the Far East, where Hong Kong was its only colony. I suggest that these accounts need to be considered alongside the consolidation of the 'tropics' as a region in British perceptions, and in doing so, this article opens discussions of the study of tropicality to the consideration not just of climate, but also of the significance of singular weather events. This article argues that the cultural representations of typhoons in the British press were a tool of 'othering'. In particular, there were two significant shifts around the 1880s in these reports. First, the term 'typhoon' became tied to these types of storms that affected Hong Kong. Second, the stories that were told about typhoon events emphasized British heroism and colonial management. Both these shifts in reporting stripped away the weather wisdom that British sailors had earlier identified in the local population.
{"title":"'Hong Kong can afford a typhoon or two': British discussions of revolving storms.","authors":"Chi Chi Huang","doi":"10.1017/S0007087421000236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000236","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the way in which the British press reported on typhoons that affected Hong Kong during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typhoons were a significant element in the narration of the British Empire, featuring frequently in British accounts of their involvements in the Far East, where Hong Kong was its only colony. I suggest that these accounts need to be considered alongside the consolidation of the 'tropics' as a region in British perceptions, and in doing so, this article opens discussions of the study of tropicality to the consideration not just of climate, but also of the significance of singular weather events. This article argues that the cultural representations of typhoons in the British press were a tool of 'othering'. In particular, there were two significant shifts around the 1880s in these reports. First, the term 'typhoon' became tied to these types of storms that affected Hong Kong. Second, the stories that were told about typhoon events emphasized British heroism and colonial management. Both these shifts in reporting stripped away the weather wisdom that British sailors had earlier identified in the local population.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":"54 3","pages":"327-339"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0007087421000236","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38969027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0007087421000054
Fiona Williamson
‘ It would be of the greatest importance to meteorology ’ , noted the editor of the Singapore Chronicle in 1829, ‘ if a set of hourly meteorological observations could be instituted at Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Singapore, Malacca, and some station on the elevated plains of Hindostan ’ . 1 Of course, the author ’ s comments speak from a uniquely imperial perspec-tive, whereby such observations would benefit the colonial service of – in this case – the British Empire, enabling enhanced knowledge of imperial atmospheres and the related economic and scientific benefits that this could bring. That meteorology was closely linked to empire and imperial control has long been acknowledged, as the ability to insti-tutionalize knowledge about an environment, and thus to define what constituted legit-imate knowledge, was ultimately a question of power. 2 In Asia, a long history of weather observation was gradually pushed into institutional scientific spaces after the 1860s, with key observatories in Tokyo, Shanghai, Manila and Hong Kong, and meteorological services in India and across the China coast. 3 This shift is attributed to the recog-nition that the science was critical to state building, especially for increasing agricultural yields; for safeguarding nascent aviation services, the latter particularly critical during the Asia-Pacific War; and for enabling better prediction systems for extremes of weather. 4
{"title":"Framing Asian atmospheres: imperial weather science and the problem of the local <i>c.</i> 1880-1950.","authors":"Fiona Williamson","doi":"10.1017/S0007087421000054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000054","url":null,"abstract":"‘ It would be of the greatest importance to meteorology ’ , noted the editor of the Singapore Chronicle in 1829, ‘ if a set of hourly meteorological observations could be instituted at Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Singapore, Malacca, and some station on the elevated plains of Hindostan ’ . 1 Of course, the author ’ s comments speak from a uniquely imperial perspec-tive, whereby such observations would benefit the colonial service of – in this case – the British Empire, enabling enhanced knowledge of imperial atmospheres and the related economic and scientific benefits that this could bring. That meteorology was closely linked to empire and imperial control has long been acknowledged, as the ability to insti-tutionalize knowledge about an environment, and thus to define what constituted legit-imate knowledge, was ultimately a question of power. 2 In Asia, a long history of weather observation was gradually pushed into institutional scientific spaces after the 1860s, with key observatories in Tokyo, Shanghai, Manila and Hong Kong, and meteorological services in India and across the China coast. 3 This shift is attributed to the recog-nition that the science was critical to state building, especially for increasing agricultural yields; for safeguarding nascent aviation services, the latter particularly critical during the Asia-Pacific War; and for enabling better prediction systems for extremes of weather. 4","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":"54 3","pages":"301-304"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0007087421000054","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39172776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0007087421000522
Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund, John Woitkowitz
This article provides a transnational analysis of the campaigns for the organization of expeditions to the central Arctic region by the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the Prussian cartographer August Petermann between 1851 and 1853. By adopting a comparative approach, this study focuses on three interventions in the history of Arctic science and exploration: the construction of scientific expertise surrounding the relationship between the 'armchair' and the field, the role of transnational networks, and the significance of maps as travelling epistemic objects in the production of knowledge about the Arctic regions. In bringing both campaigns in conversation with each other, this article demonstrates that the histories of Kane's and Petermann's campaigns did not constitute isolated episodes but form part of a transnational nexus of imperial science and Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century. Moreover, based on research in libraries and archives in the United States, Germany and England, this study reconnects otherwise siloed collections and contributes new findings on the interpersonal networks of science and exploration. Finally, this article illustrates the importance of adopting comparative transnational approaches for understanding the fluid and reciprocal nature of Arctic science throughout the transatlantic world.
{"title":"'Ancient lore with modern appliances': networks, expertise, and the making of the Open Polar Sea, 1851-1853.","authors":"Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund, John Woitkowitz","doi":"10.1017/S0007087421000522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000522","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article provides a transnational analysis of the campaigns for the organization of expeditions to the central Arctic region by the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the Prussian cartographer August Petermann between 1851 and 1853. By adopting a comparative approach, this study focuses on three interventions in the history of Arctic science and exploration: the construction of scientific expertise surrounding the relationship between the 'armchair' and the field, the role of transnational networks, and the significance of maps as travelling epistemic objects in the production of knowledge about the Arctic regions. In bringing both campaigns in conversation with each other, this article demonstrates that the histories of Kane's and Petermann's campaigns did not constitute isolated episodes but form part of a transnational nexus of imperial science and Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century. Moreover, based on research in libraries and archives in the United States, Germany and England, this study reconnects otherwise siloed collections and contributes new findings on the interpersonal networks of science and exploration. Finally, this article illustrates the importance of adopting comparative transnational approaches for understanding the fluid and reciprocal nature of Arctic science throughout the transatlantic world.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":"54 3","pages":"277-299"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0007087421000522","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39207824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0007087421000297
Samantha Wesner
The 1790 Fête de la fédération in the early French Revolution evoked the memory of the taking of the Bastille while tamping down on the simmering social forces that had erupted on 14 July 1789. How to do both? As an official architect put it, through the festival, 'the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all by a kind of electrification, against which even the most perverse men cannot defend themselves'. This paper argues that a new language of revolutionary electricity came into being with the French Revolution. It argues that revolutionaries drew upon concepts of medical electricity developed in the 1780s to analogize the literal electricity of the ether to the revolutionary electricity of collective political sentiment. Though historians have associated electricity with radical politics, this paper argues that in the hands of bureaucrats and festival planners, electricity entered revolutionary discourse as a powerful mechanism for exercising authority and control over an unruly revolutionary public.
1790年,法国大革命初期的Fête de la fsamdassim唤起了人们对攻占巴士底狱的记忆,同时镇压了1789年7月14日爆发的酝酿中的社会力量。如何两者兼得?正如一位官方建筑师所说,通过这个节日,“每个人的情感通过一种电气化变成了所有人的情感,即使是最乖愎的人也无法为自己辩护”。本文认为,一种新的革命电学语言是随着法国大革命而产生的。它认为革命者借鉴了18世纪80年代发展起来的医疗电的概念,将以太的字面电类比为集体政治情感的革命电。虽然历史学家将电力与激进政治联系在一起,但本文认为,在官僚和节日策划者的手中,电力作为一种强大的机制进入了革命话语,用于行使权威和控制不守纪律的革命公众。
{"title":"Revolutionary electricity in 1790: shock, consensus, and the birth of a political metaphor.","authors":"Samantha Wesner","doi":"10.1017/S0007087421000297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000297","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The 1790 Fête de la fédération in the early French Revolution evoked the memory of the taking of the Bastille while tamping down on the simmering social forces that had erupted on 14 July 1789. How to do both? As an official architect put it, through the festival, 'the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all by a kind of electrification, against which even the most perverse men cannot defend themselves'. This paper argues that a new language of revolutionary electricity came into being with the French Revolution. It argues that revolutionaries drew upon concepts of medical electricity developed in the 1780s to analogize the literal electricity of the ether to the revolutionary electricity of collective political sentiment. Though historians have associated electricity with radical politics, this paper argues that in the hands of bureaucrats and festival planners, electricity entered revolutionary discourse as a powerful mechanism for exercising authority and control over an unruly revolutionary public.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":"54 3","pages":"257-275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0007087421000297","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39253309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0007087421000285
Mark E Frank
Across Tibet during the 1940s, young Han Chinese weather observers became stranded at their weather stations, where they faced illness, poverty and isolation as they pleaded with their superiors for relief. Building on the premise that China exercised 'imperial nationalism' in Tibet, and in light of scholarship that emphasizes the desirous 'gaze' of imperial observers toward the frontier, this essay considers how the meteorological archive might disrupt our understanding of the relationship between observation and empire. Meteorology presented a new way of viewing the landscape that deliberately disregarded the embodied experience of the observer in favour of instrument-mediated readings. The process produced a bifurcated archive, in which stations disseminated quantitative weather charts as a matter of public interest while privately recording the embodied and often miserable experiences of observational staff on the frontier. Unpublished letters between observers and supervisors offer a rare glimpse into the frontier as experienced by reluctant or unwilling agents of the state.
{"title":"Frontier atmosphere: observation and regret at Chinese weather stations in Tibet, 1939-1949.","authors":"Mark E Frank","doi":"10.1017/S0007087421000285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000285","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Across Tibet during the 1940s, young Han Chinese weather observers became stranded at their weather stations, where they faced illness, poverty and isolation as they pleaded with their superiors for relief. Building on the premise that China exercised 'imperial nationalism' in Tibet, and in light of scholarship that emphasizes the desirous 'gaze' of imperial observers toward the frontier, this essay considers how the meteorological archive might disrupt our understanding of the relationship between observation and empire. Meteorology presented a new way of viewing the landscape that deliberately disregarded the embodied experience of the observer in favour of instrument-mediated readings. The process produced a bifurcated archive, in which stations disseminated quantitative weather charts as a matter of public interest while privately recording the embodied and often miserable experiences of observational staff on the frontier. Unpublished letters between observers and supervisors offer a rare glimpse into the frontier as experienced by reluctant or unwilling agents of the state.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":"54 3","pages":"361-379"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0007087421000285","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39177604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}