This paper traces the experiences of about a dozen Chinese students/scientists who studied with the aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán at the California Institute of Technology in the 1930s and 1940s. This special group provides an early instance of a situation that has attracted significant scholarly attention since the 1960s—educational migration of highly talented individuals and the difficult choices those individuals faced when they decided to stay abroad or to return home. This study deepens the scholarship on ‘study abroad motivation’ for international students and the push–pull factors related to returning to their homeland or staying abroad. Kármán tried to support his students' decisions whatever they were, without putting pressure on their decision to stay or to return. The thinking of the students was inevitably affected by changes in Sino–US relations and changes in US policy. All struggled to meet their obligation to homeland, family expectations and senses of personal honour against the advanced academic environment they had enjoyed. The stability of America's peaceful society and improved material standards of living compared with China made this a difficult decision. Different people balanced these competing demands differently. The key was how they decided to take advantage—or not—of the new circumstances.
{"title":"Emigration or return? International mobility and Theodore von Kármán's Chinese students and associates","authors":"Zhang Zhihui","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"This paper traces the experiences of about a dozen Chinese students/scientists who studied with the aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán at the California Institute of Technology in the 1930s and 1940s. This special group provides an early instance of a situation that has attracted significant scholarly attention since the 1960s—educational migration of highly talented individuals and the difficult choices those individuals faced when they decided to stay abroad or to return home. This study deepens the scholarship on ‘study abroad motivation’ for international students and the push–pull factors related to returning to their homeland or staying abroad. Kármán tried to support his students' decisions whatever they were, without putting pressure on their decision to stay or to return. The thinking of the students was inevitably affected by changes in Sino–US relations and changes in US policy. All struggled to meet their obligation to homeland, family expectations and senses of personal honour against the advanced academic environment they had enjoyed. The stability of America's peaceful society and improved material standards of living compared with China made this a difficult decision. Different people balanced these competing demands differently. The key was how they decided to take advantage—or not—of the new circumstances.","PeriodicalId":82881,"journal":{"name":"Tanzania notes and records","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84345157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This special issue investigates women's scientific networks in Europe roughly between 1720 and 1830, an interesting period from a gender point of view. The articles analyse the role that networks played in enabling, shaping and circumscribing women in their intellectual pursuits, social aspirations and ideals. They also focus on the nature of the members' relationships, how women negotiated their scientific identities and how often women could use their femininity to create new social spaces for themselves and their families. We traced different types of networks such as ‘paper’, ‘technical’, ‘distant’ (in its special and temporal sense), ‘moral’ and ‘mixed’, as well as how many of these networks were characterized by broad intellectual engagement that was never exclusively scientific, but also literary, poetic, educational and philosophical.
{"title":"Enlightened Female Networks: Gendered Ways of Producing Knowledge (1720–1830)","authors":"Anna Maerker, Elena Serrano, S. Werrett","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2021.0072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0072","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue investigates women's scientific networks in Europe roughly between 1720 and 1830, an interesting period from a gender point of view. The articles analyse the role that networks played in enabling, shaping and circumscribing women in their intellectual pursuits, social aspirations and ideals. They also focus on the nature of the members' relationships, how women negotiated their scientific identities and how often women could use their femininity to create new social spaces for themselves and their families. We traced different types of networks such as ‘paper’, ‘technical’, ‘distant’ (in its special and temporal sense), ‘moral’ and ‘mixed’, as well as how many of these networks were characterized by broad intellectual engagement that was never exclusively scientific, but also literary, poetic, educational and philosophical.","PeriodicalId":82881,"journal":{"name":"Tanzania notes and records","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89893646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scientific journal publishing has become a lucrative enterprise, for commercial firms and (some) society publishers alike; but it was not always thus. The Royal Society is the publisher of the world's longest-running scientific journal, and for most of the history of the Philosophical Transactions, its publication was a severe drain on the Society's finances. This paper uses the rich archives of the Royal Society to investigate the economic transformation of journal publishing over the course of the twentieth century. It began the century as a scholarly mission activity heavily subsidized by the Society, but ended it as a valuable income stream. Never-before-seen data reveal three phases: the end of the philanthropic model of circulation; the transition to a sales-based commercial model amidst the post-war boom in subscriber numbers; and the challenges facing that new business model once subscriber numbers went into decline in the late twentieth century. The paper does not directly address the open access movement of the twenty-first century, but is essential reading to understand the financial background.
{"title":"From philanthropy to business: the economics of Royal Society journal publishing in the twentieth century","authors":"Aileen Fyfe","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Scientific journal publishing has become a lucrative enterprise, for commercial firms and (some) society publishers alike; but it was not always thus. The Royal Society is the publisher of the world's longest-running scientific journal, and for most of the history of the Philosophical Transactions, its publication was a severe drain on the Society's finances. This paper uses the rich archives of the Royal Society to investigate the economic transformation of journal publishing over the course of the twentieth century. It began the century as a scholarly mission activity heavily subsidized by the Society, but ended it as a valuable income stream. Never-before-seen data reveal three phases: the end of the philanthropic model of circulation; the transition to a sales-based commercial model amidst the post-war boom in subscriber numbers; and the challenges facing that new business model once subscriber numbers went into decline in the late twentieth century. The paper does not directly address the open access movement of the twenty-first century, but is essential reading to understand the financial background.","PeriodicalId":82881,"journal":{"name":"Tanzania notes and records","volume":"331 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77600012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Known as a translator and illustrator of chemical texts, Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier (1758–1836) has been often represented as the associate of male savants and especially of her husband, the French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. This article explores her biography from a different angle and focuses on her trajectories as a secrétaire; namely, someone whose main charge was to store and exchange information by means of writing. The article investigates the presence of women in Paulze-Lavoisier's network before and after Lavoisier's death in 1794. First, it shows that her work as a secrétaire combined a wide set of writing practices with domestic sociability. Then, it examines how other women contributed to her collaboration with Lavoisier. Finally, it analyses how these relationships changed in the post-revolutionary and Napoleonic era, when Paulze-Lavoisier's role as a secrétaire took on a new meaning.
{"title":"Madame Lavoisier and the Others: Women in Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier's Network (1771–1836)","authors":"Francesca Antonelli","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2021.0074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0074","url":null,"abstract":"Known as a translator and illustrator of chemical texts, Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier (1758–1836) has been often represented as the associate of male savants and especially of her husband, the French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. This article explores her biography from a different angle and focuses on her trajectories as a secrétaire; namely, someone whose main charge was to store and exchange information by means of writing. The article investigates the presence of women in Paulze-Lavoisier's network before and after Lavoisier's death in 1794. First, it shows that her work as a secrétaire combined a wide set of writing practices with domestic sociability. Then, it examines how other women contributed to her collaboration with Lavoisier. Finally, it analyses how these relationships changed in the post-revolutionary and Napoleonic era, when Paulze-Lavoisier's role as a secrétaire took on a new meaning.","PeriodicalId":82881,"journal":{"name":"Tanzania notes and records","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74756683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1781, the first issue of The Lady's Poetical Magazine lauded Queen Charlotte (1744–1818) for her role in furthering the sciences, and indeed, to give but one example, the queen's interest in the geological researches of her reader, Jean André de Luc (1727–1817), induced him to write a treatise on his system for her perusal. Besides assembling a significant library containing volumes on all kinds of intellectual pursuits, she collected natural history specimens and scientific instruments, and employed, funded or corresponded with both male and female scientists, often by means of intermediaries. Like many other eighteenth-century women, the queen was aware of the significance of diligent networking, although she, too, as this article shows, faced particular difficulties when trying to assemble or access networks at court, despite her many connections to bluestockings, physicians, astronomers and botanists. Women's scientific interests have frequently been obscured by historiography's focus on the pursuits of male scientists: by uncovering female networks such as Queen Charlotte's, we get a chance to revise our notions of (elite) women's scientific pursuits in the eighteenth century.
{"title":"Queen Charlotte's Scientific Collections and Natural History Networks","authors":"Mascha Hansen","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2021.0070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0070","url":null,"abstract":"In 1781, the first issue of The Lady's Poetical Magazine lauded Queen Charlotte (1744–1818) for her role in furthering the sciences, and indeed, to give but one example, the queen's interest in the geological researches of her reader, Jean André de Luc (1727–1817), induced him to write a treatise on his system for her perusal. Besides assembling a significant library containing volumes on all kinds of intellectual pursuits, she collected natural history specimens and scientific instruments, and employed, funded or corresponded with both male and female scientists, often by means of intermediaries. Like many other eighteenth-century women, the queen was aware of the significance of diligent networking, although she, too, as this article shows, faced particular difficulties when trying to assemble or access networks at court, despite her many connections to bluestockings, physicians, astronomers and botanists. Women's scientific interests have frequently been obscured by historiography's focus on the pursuits of male scientists: by uncovering female networks such as Queen Charlotte's, we get a chance to revise our notions of (elite) women's scientific pursuits in the eighteenth century.","PeriodicalId":82881,"journal":{"name":"Tanzania notes and records","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83251419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Printed images played a role in the strategies of savant amateurs of the Enlightenment in consolidating their scientific networks, traced here through the case study of Johann Heinrich Merck. Convinced of the importance of his palaeontological findings, Merck developed an impressive network from Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Samuel Thomas Sömmerring to Petrus Camper and Joseph Banks. Academic celebrities set an important horizon for Merck's aspirations, but his ambitions also depended on professional artists. Increasingly disappointed with printmakers' contribution to natural history, Merck eventually emancipated himself as an etcher in his own right. This article's focus is on printed images regarded as both visual and material sources; both preserved—some neglected hitherto—and those only known via written sources, whose record allows for a detailed reconstruction of events and the intentions behind them. As images used to disseminate knowledge, they were expected to be reliable; as objects employed in the pursuit of scholarly recognition, they were supposed to reach their recipients post-haste. An inspection of Merck's utilization of printed images, with their concomitant demand for reliability and speed, reveals a pattern of misjudgements in his career and a craving for attention and primacy, which repeatedly exposed him to predicaments.
{"title":"Bones of contention: Johann Heinrich Merck's palaeontological encounters with academic scholars and professional printmakers","authors":"Grażyna Jurkowlaniec","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Printed images played a role in the strategies of savant amateurs of the Enlightenment in consolidating their scientific networks, traced here through the case study of Johann Heinrich Merck. Convinced of the importance of his palaeontological findings, Merck developed an impressive network from Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Samuel Thomas Sömmerring to Petrus Camper and Joseph Banks. Academic celebrities set an important horizon for Merck's aspirations, but his ambitions also depended on professional artists. Increasingly disappointed with printmakers' contribution to natural history, Merck eventually emancipated himself as an etcher in his own right. This article's focus is on printed images regarded as both visual and material sources; both preserved—some neglected hitherto—and those only known via written sources, whose record allows for a detailed reconstruction of events and the intentions behind them. As images used to disseminate knowledge, they were expected to be reliable; as objects employed in the pursuit of scholarly recognition, they were supposed to reach their recipients post-haste. An inspection of Merck's utilization of printed images, with their concomitant demand for reliability and speed, reveals a pattern of misjudgements in his career and a craving for attention and primacy, which repeatedly exposed him to predicaments.","PeriodicalId":82881,"journal":{"name":"Tanzania notes and records","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90732002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1667, twenty years before Isaac Newton published his mathematization of physics, and more than ten years before the publication of Giovanni Borelli's De motu animalium, the Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno published an entirely new geometrical theory of muscle motion in the book Elementorum myologiæ specimen. Historians of science have studied this book in recent decades, but the recent rediscovery of a seventeenth-century muscle atlas at the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé in Paris sheds new light on the largely overlooked origin of Steno's mathematical theory of muscles. In this article, we show that Steno's muscle diagrams result from a tension that Steno faced when combining his interest in illustrations with presenting his mathematical insights about the inner structure of muscle fibres. Furthermore, we argue that Steno's diagrams are deeply connected to observations through a new method of dissecting the muscles. The observational origins of Steno's mathematical insight are further confirmed by the strong correlation between Steno's depictions of the structure and function of skeletal muscles and the results of current biomechanical investigations.
{"title":"Drawing muscles with diagrams: how a novel dissection cut inspired Nicolaus Steno's mathematical myology (1667)","authors":"N. Castel-Branco, T. Kardel","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"In 1667, twenty years before Isaac Newton published his mathematization of physics, and more than ten years before the publication of Giovanni Borelli's De motu animalium, the Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno published an entirely new geometrical theory of muscle motion in the book Elementorum myologiæ specimen. Historians of science have studied this book in recent decades, but the recent rediscovery of a seventeenth-century muscle atlas at the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé in Paris sheds new light on the largely overlooked origin of Steno's mathematical theory of muscles. In this article, we show that Steno's muscle diagrams result from a tension that Steno faced when combining his interest in illustrations with presenting his mathematical insights about the inner structure of muscle fibres. Furthermore, we argue that Steno's diagrams are deeply connected to observations through a new method of dissecting the muscles. The observational origins of Steno's mathematical insight are further confirmed by the strong correlation between Steno's depictions of the structure and function of skeletal muscles and the results of current biomechanical investigations.","PeriodicalId":82881,"journal":{"name":"Tanzania notes and records","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87329767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper explores female networking practices by comparing cases two centuries apart, an experiment made possible by a history of science renewed by a mutually enriching dialogue with science, technology and society studies (STS). The first part analyses the networking strategies of Clotilde Tambroni (1758–1817), a scholar who managed a university career in Bologna under the shadow of the Napoleonic wars. The second part presents some results of ongoing research on the networking strategies of a group of female feminist evolutionary biologists who, by building a ‘Darwinian feminism’ tradition, offered an alternative response to the 1990s nature-versus-nurture clashes leading to the so-called science wars. Grappling with the myth of a ‘female brain’ and building diachronic as well as synchronic networks among women scholars in both the Napoleonic wars context and the end of the Cold War, the female scholars examined here transcended dualistic simplifications about the nature of knowledge typical of their times. The two cases suggest a long-term, integrated, gendered approach that finds concrete expression in the outcomes of some recent neuroscience research as well as in the ‘gendered innovations in science’ project mentioned in my conclusions.
{"title":"Feminist networks beyond the science wars: the ‘female brain’ in the 1790s and the 1990s","authors":"Paola Govoni","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2021.0075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0075","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores female networking practices by comparing cases two centuries apart, an experiment made possible by a history of science renewed by a mutually enriching dialogue with science, technology and society studies (STS). The first part analyses the networking strategies of Clotilde Tambroni (1758–1817), a scholar who managed a university career in Bologna under the shadow of the Napoleonic wars. The second part presents some results of ongoing research on the networking strategies of a group of female feminist evolutionary biologists who, by building a ‘Darwinian feminism’ tradition, offered an alternative response to the 1990s nature-versus-nurture clashes leading to the so-called science wars. Grappling with the myth of a ‘female brain’ and building diachronic as well as synchronic networks among women scholars in both the Napoleonic wars context and the end of the Cold War, the female scholars examined here transcended dualistic simplifications about the nature of knowledge typical of their times. The two cases suggest a long-term, integrated, gendered approach that finds concrete expression in the outcomes of some recent neuroscience research as well as in the ‘gendered innovations in science’ project mentioned in my conclusions.","PeriodicalId":82881,"journal":{"name":"Tanzania notes and records","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82471311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article discusses the participation of women in the development of eighteenth-century French political economy and, more specifically, their role in the network of a prominent group of French economic authors of this period, known as the physiocrats. Our argument is that women played a significant, if seldom visible, role in the creation and dissemination of the ‘new science’ of physiocratic political economy. First, they acted as cultural mediators of the science nouvelle. It explains why the major physiocrats created a model of scientific institution that mixed academic life with salon sociability, and that was therefore open to women unlike the main European academies of the period. Second, we underline the importance of the domestic sphere in the making of physiocratic political economy. The case study of Marie Le Dée, the spouse of a prominent physiocrat, informed us on the invisible though important agency of women in the production of physiocratic knowledge.
本文讨论了女性在18世纪法国政治经济学发展中的参与,更具体地说,她们在这一时期著名的法国经济作家群体(即重农主义者)的网络中所扮演的角色。我们的论点是,女性在重农主义政治经济学的“新科学”的创造和传播中发挥了重要的作用,尽管很少被人看到。首先,他们扮演了科学小说文化媒介的角色。这就解释了为什么重农主义者创造了一种科学机构的模式,将学术生活与沙龙社交相结合,因此,与当时主要的欧洲学院不同,这种模式对女性开放。第二,强调国内领域在重农主义政治经济学建设中的重要性。Marie Le dsame是一位著名重农主义者的配偶,她的案例研究告诉我们,女性在重农主义知识的产生中发挥着无形但重要的作用。
{"title":"Les femmes économistes: the place of women in the physiocratic community","authors":"Loïc Charles, C. Théré","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2021.0067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0067","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the participation of women in the development of eighteenth-century French political economy and, more specifically, their role in the network of a prominent group of French economic authors of this period, known as the physiocrats. Our argument is that women played a significant, if seldom visible, role in the creation and dissemination of the ‘new science’ of physiocratic political economy. First, they acted as cultural mediators of the science nouvelle. It explains why the major physiocrats created a model of scientific institution that mixed academic life with salon sociability, and that was therefore open to women unlike the main European academies of the period. Second, we underline the importance of the domestic sphere in the making of physiocratic political economy. The case study of Marie Le Dée, the spouse of a prominent physiocrat, informed us on the invisible though important agency of women in the production of physiocratic knowledge.","PeriodicalId":82881,"journal":{"name":"Tanzania notes and records","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83976761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}