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This essay explores the material imperatives of nineteenth-century statistical ambition, at a time when the nature of paper itself underwent rapid change. It expands the concept of paper technologies to include knowledge about the materials themselves, as well as the infrastructures, techniques, and agreements that made it possible for the right kind of paper to be made available for particular purposes. Taking the production of the forms for the Prussian census as a case in point, it argues that the enumeration effort of Prussian census statisticians went far beyond designing a form, collecting information, noting and compiling figures, or creating tables. Paper knowledge to define and control the material substance of the forms mattered as much as political impetus and statistical methods in getting the census right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives of supply chains and raw materials are a poor fit for early modern Europeans' "thrifty" habit of reusing and reworking goods into new forms. This essay stresses the importance of such habits for early modern work using the example of paper, as a medium, instrument, and epistemic resource in various domestic and scientific spheres. Thrifty perspectives challenge not only linear supply narratives but also enduring accounts of the identities of materials themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a significant challenge to countries worldwide, and South Asia has not been an exception. The region is home to over 1.8 billion people and some of the world's largest cities, making it a potential hotspot for the virus's spread. This paper presents case studies from three South Asian countries: India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, analyzing their response to the pandemic and the measures taken to contain its spread. The paper analyzes India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka's healthcare infrastructures, their strengths and weaknesses, and the measures taken by these governments to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the economy and society. Overall, the paper provides insights into the response to the pandemic in South Asia, highlighting the successes and challenges faced by the countries analyzed. The case studies offer valuable lessons on the importance of preparedness, effective communication, and coordinated responses to pandemics. They also underscore the need for greater investment in healthcare infrastructure and the importance of addressing socioeconomic disparities to effectively combat pandemics in the region. This paper also brings together the recent publications on the current pandemic to help understand the recent works in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of recent literature on the history of epidemics in East Asia, with a primary focus on modern and contemporary China, but including some discussion of the scholarship in English on epidemics in Korea and Japan. Key research strands are identified within the field: local and regional histories, disease biographies, histories of public health campaigns, global connections, and cultural representations. The paper argues that studies of epidemic disease have been central to debates about East Asian modernity, transformations of the state, the formation of a post-imperial citizenry, postcolonial science and technology studies, and East Asia's role in globalizing processes. The paper concludes by reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic and the issues it raises for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The report is a summary of the History of Science Society Annual Meeting in 2023, which focused on the theme of "Shifting Standards, Creating Change." The meeting explored social justice work in response to global humanitarian crises and the Black Lives Matter movement. It featured panels and papers on topics such as the history of science, restorative projects, and diversity in the field. The report also highlights the winners of the HSS Prizes for 2023, which recognized outstanding contributions to the history of science. The award-winning books and essays cover a range of topics, including early modern European thought on extinction, the use of fish to combat malaria in colonial India, nonbinary gender, the relationship between humans and the sky, and the history of quantification. These works provide valuable insights into the intersections of science, culture, and society throughout history. [Extracted from the article]

This introduction to the Focus section "Supplied Knowledge: Resource Regimes, Materials, and Epistemic Tools" provides a framework to analyze critically the ways in which knowledge depends on material supplies. It claims that most scientific technologies of the early modern and modern periods were made possible only by the steady supply of a large variety of so-called natural resources and that the practices necessary to exploit, process, and provide these resources in the quality and quantity required were closely linked with the scientific and humanistic agendas of their time. The essays assembled here examine select epistemic tools and key materials from which these were made. This introduction shows how the essays apply different scales to reveal the local and global values, epistemic concepts, aesthetic ideals, social systems, (geo)political constellations, and economic frameworks that have co-constituted the making of scientific instruments, artifacts, and knowledge in and beyond the Global North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French botanist Michel Adanson spent five years in precolonial Senegal in the 1750s, under the auspices of the Compagnie des Indes. This essay follows the archival traces of Adanson's engagement with African indigo, including experiments conducted in an ad hoc "laboratory" near the French fort of Saint Louis. A reconstruction of these experiments exposes the multifarious connections to and from the island garden-laboratory, mediated by materials and different kinds of indigo knowledge, including that of local Wolof informants. A microhistory of encounters in and around a tiny island off the West African coast merges with a transatlantic story connecting Senegal to Paris and to French colonies in the Caribbean (Saint-Domingue and Guyana). The essay explores geographies of knowledge and French imperial ambitions through close attention to the material properties of indigo, the practices associated with its cultivation and transformation from plant to dye, and the material remnants of Adanson's engagement with it in Africa. These remnants—herbarium sheets, experimental notes, color samples on paper strips, dyed fabric swatches, sketched maps, correspondence, collection catalogues, and plant taxonomies—put various kinds of African knowledge and Caribbean plantation experience into dialogue with European botany and dye chemistry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys the historiography of the global response to HIV/AIDS. Since 1981, when the disease was first identified, there have been great strides in the medical and biological sciences in understanding the impact of the new virus on the human immune system. Although there is still no successful vaccine, antiretroviral (ART) treatment continues to improve the likelihood of HIV-positive people living long and healthy lives. We have also seen a few exciting cases of full recovery, which will allow scientists to explore new avenues towards a cure. Yet the AIDS pandemic is by no means over: 40 million have died and over 35 million individuals still live with HIV. More importantly, as historians and scholars in the humanities and social sciences have been pointing out since the early 1980s, HIV brought to light how non-medical factors play a critical role in a successful disease response. As the global community faces the aftermath of a new pandemic, it is timely to examine how broader social, economic, political, and cultural factors influence individual experiences of disease at local, national, international, and global scales. This essay examines how scholars have written historically about the HIV pandemic, using a variety of methods and approaches: from traditional histories of medicine to anthropologies of development. While HIV has sparked a massive corpus of historical reflection from a variety of disciplines, its contemporaneity means that "global AIDS historiography" cannot yet be described as a cohesive academic conversation. Yet what unites the scholarship, this essay argues, is its use of HIV to examine how and why post-war social and economic systems have achieved health objectives for some populations and not others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an introduction to the history of the concept of "emerging infectious diseases" (EID) and reflects on how humanities and social science scholars have interacted with it. It starts with a chronological outline of the coinage of the concept in the early 1990s in the wake of the shocks provoked by Ebola and HIV/AIDS, which disrupted the idea that the West was transitioning from a period of infectious diseases to one of chronic diseases. We argue that humanities and social science scholars in disciplines such as history, anthropology, STS, and literature studies have critically explored the concept, showing how entrenched it was in the perceptions of the US and Europe about threats posed by the rest of the globe. Moreover, we explore how scholars in the humanities have used the EID concept to comment on contemporary realities and mobilized it to create dialogues with scientists, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently, we explore how the growing contemporary interest in EID has pushed historians to research the ontological and epistemological factors that enabled the "emergence" of diseases long before the invention of the EID concept, such as plague, Chagas disease, and sleeping sickness, as well as the factors that transformed these and other emerging diseases into pandemics. We conclude by outlining a few neglected factors in the EID literature that could be addressed: the circulation and reception of the concept outside of the West, the examination of EID as a problem for wild animals and not just for humans, and global histories of disease emergence as an epistemological and social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pasteur Institute of Iran underwent a major expansion of its research productivity and international recognition during some of the most significant events of modern Iranian history: the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, followed by the Anglo-American coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. During this period, the institute's French director, Marcel Baltazard, was embedded in a complex set of working relationships with his Iranian employees, research subjects, and government ministers; American scientists and foreign aid workers; and French Pasteurians and diplomats. Baltazard constantly described these relationships as instances of "collaboration." The temporal and geographical context demands a critical reading of scientific collaboration alongside the negative implications of political collaboration. Investigating the political commitments and social attitudes of the French director and Iranian staff, this essay demonstrates that scientific collaboration at the institute both reinforced socioeconomic inequalities within Iran and mirrored global Cold War geopolitics that undermined Iranian sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues for taking fieldwork seriously, but not too seriously. It focuses on geologists and geomorphologists in the United States in the post–World War II decades who used irony, satire, and self-conscious staging to negotiate the contradictions between the tradition of frontier fieldwork that they had inherited from the late nineteenth century and the realities of mid-twentieth-century fieldwork, which they often found hard to fit into the heroic mold. Poking fun at the fieldwork tradition, the essay argues, helped them claim that tradition as their own even while constructing new scientific personas and practices that diverged from it in a number of ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spedding-Ellis-Heath edition of The Works of Francis Bacon appeared in seven volumes between 1857 and 1859. Both a monument to Victorian scholarship and a staple of the history of science, this classic and historically significant work has been the authoritative edition of Bacon's oeuvre ever since. This essay tells part of the story of its creation, reception, and influence. It describes the origin of and plan for the edition and, focusing on the three philosophical volumes, examines in detail the collaboration between James Spedding and Robert Leslie Ellis. On the basis of fresh archival research, it is shown that Spedding and Ellis disagreed fundamentally about the very thing their new edition was meant to settle: the correct interpretation of Bacon's philosophical writings and of the role of his famous inductive method in the development of modern science from the time of Newton. With the Works , Spedding and Ellis did more than furnish what was long believed to be the Baconian canon; they also (at least in part unwittingly) produced a valuable primary source for the history of nineteenth-century Baconianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As NASA prepared to land astronauts on the Moon in the 1960s, scientists and federal officials came to fear that they could bring lunar microorganisms back to Earth, with potentially grave consequences for human, plant, and animal life. To prevent this "back contamination," representatives from NASA and a network of federal departments and services developed a protocol to quarantine astronauts, equipment, samples, and spacecraft exposed to lunar dust. Yet although NASA assured policy makers and an anxious public that it had implemented impermeable safeguards against the escape of lunar microorganisms, it had in fact prioritized likely risks to astronauts over unlikely risks to American society. To a degree previously unknown, the Apollo quarantine protocol suffered from numerous containment breaches that would likely have exposed the terrestrial biosphere to contamination—had lunar microorganisms actually existed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talking about the things we know is at once an everyday occurrence and an incredibly complicated process—the complexity of which, as historians of science have frequently demonstrated, can be a hindrance to the production and communication of knowledge. This essay frames this difficulty as a problem of translation. "Translation" here means two things: first, the interlinguistic process of moving ideas from one language to another; and, second, the intralinguistic question of whether knowledge can be turned into words at all, regardless of the languages in question. Paying attention to both dimensions of the translation problem, the essay explores various solutions proposed in and with the Swahili language during the colonial and postcolonial periods in Tanganyika/Tanzania. This context brings into stark relief the flows of power and authority that often determine which ways of speaking and knowing are accepted and which dismissed; it also brings to light translations that sometimes move against the expected current of power, as speakers and writers, both "expert" and "nonexpert," simply went about the business of discussing the things they knew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of medicine and generation have long demonstrated how the female body was conceptualized as a site of secrecy in early modern Europe. This essay explores one oft-overlooked organ of the female body—the placenta, which was considered by early modern anatomists to be a particularly challenging secret to uncover. Anatomists who investigated this organ discovered that it was largely absent from the ancients' accounts of their knowledge of generation, and their own studies of its structure and function revealed a complexity difficult to understand. Through an analysis of anatomical treatises and midwifery guides, this essay investigates how textual and visual knowledge about the placenta was produced and shared by anatomists, medical practitioners, and female midwives. It argues that the secrets of the placenta presented a lucrative opportunity for anatomists to expand their intellectual and financial riches. The study provides fresh insights for historians of science, medicine, and gender and new perspectives on the history of reproduction and embryology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great variety of tuning forks survive in collections around the world, from departments of physics, phonetics, and psychology to medical settings, conservatories, and museum collections. Their ubiquity speaks to their iconic status, while their diversity points to the multifaceted cultures of materiality that shaped and formed around these objects. This essay traces the complex supply chains of nineteenth-century tuning forks, from the gathering and processing of iron ore and crucible steel, to their sites of manufacture, to their various uses. By probing further into these nodes of supply and use, the essay uncovers a chain of values and contingencies that reveal the interdependencies between extracting, commercial, scientific, and artistic practices of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the spread of silver as commodity money in the early modern world to mass-produced national currency in the nineteenth century, coins had a dual nature. They supplied facts about the past when they were investigated by antiquarians, and they required knowledge of materials and their supply when used as currency. This essay explores a little-researched borderland between economic history and history of science: the work of assayers and mint officials, where antiquarian and commercial interests merged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, established in 1900, and its subsequent commitment to collecting music, voices, and sonic evidence from all over the world. But members of the archive managed to embrace the world as a resource in another respect as well: the daily production of cylinder records required large quantities of wax and various other materials that depended on a global system of supply and considerable exploitation of nature. The essay shows that the manufacture of the cylinders resonated with the research agendas developed at the Phonogramm-Archiv during the eras of the German Empire, World War I, German colonialism, and the Weimar Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines a controversy that erupted in 2004 over the bones of a human relative discovered in Indonesia, proclaimed to be a new species named Homo floresiensis. It argues that the controversy comprised two intertwined struggles with roots in Indonesia's colonial history. Indonesia's transition to an independent country, it contends, gave rise to a particular set of cultural values, scientific practices, and theories that resulted in scientific objects becoming tied to national identity in ways that shaped the debates. Highlighting the imbalances that can occur in cross-cultural negotiations over the study of human relatives, this essay reveals that the circulation of scientific objects is not a simple process. By focusing on how anthropological objects moved—and the claims of ownership and access embedded in those movements—it illustrates the role of local circumstances in shaping that knowledge as it contributes to increasingly global science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Making Sex (1990), Thomas Laqueur argued for a dramatic shift in Western medical understandings of sex difference circa 1800, falsely claiming that before then women were generally understood as imperfect men, their genitals trapped inside their bodies by their lack of complexional heat. In fact, the period before 1800 saw the coexistence of competing traditions relating to genital anatomy and function, in which Arabic medical compendia, largely ignored by Laqueur, played an important role. European interest in the inside/out model of the genitals was initially specific to the late medieval Latin surgical tradition. Later elaborated by several sixteenth-century medical writers, including the surgeons Jacopo Berengario of Carpi and Ambroise Paré, it was moribund in learned European medicine by 1600, though it continued to flourish for several decades in vernacular literature, medical and nonmedical, in large part because it invited an explicit discussion of sexual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces an anthropological practice that remains largely unexplored in the historical literature on racial science: biometrics. In the early twentieth century, biometricians analyzed skull measurements using novel statistical methods to demonstrate racial biological differences. Drawing on new archival material, the essay reveals how these biometric data practices challenged racist anthropology. Between 1934 and 1952, Geoffrey Morant, an expert on biometry and race in Karl Pearson's Biometric Laboratory in London, mobilized biometry to debunk Nazi racial theories. He informed the public about Nazism's fallacies in The Races of Central Europe (1939) and his UNESCO pamphlet The Significance of Racial Differences (1952). Unlike anti-racism campaigners such as Ashley Montagu, however, Morant did not dismiss the biological reality of race in his fight against Nazi racism. The essay shows that the coexistence of anti-racist and racializing practices was not paradoxical but, rather, an important feature of the anthropological study of human variation in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a master narrative for understanding the emergence of the modern world, the concept of a seventeenth-century scientific revolution has been central to the history of science. It is generally believed that this key analytical framework was created in Europe and became widely used for the first time during the Cold War through the writings of Herbert Butterfield and Alexander Koyré. This view, however, is mistaken. The scientific revolution is largely a product of debates about social reconstruction in the United States in the aftermath of World War I. Promoted in a pioneering book by the Austrian immigrant Martha Ornstein, highlighted in a provocative bestseller by the historian James Harvey Robinson, the scientific revolution was taught in thousands of interwar high schools and colleges. Based on John Dewey's advocacy of "the scientific method" and on evolutionary psychology and anthropology, the concept underpinned campaigns for women's rights, racial equality, secular humanism, and global peace. These progressive political ambitions were abandoned after World War II, when the scientific revolution became fundamental not only to forging the history of science as a discipline but also to redefining what it meant to be "modern" during an era of decolonization and the consolidation of global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies on the reception of Darwinism in France focus on the scientific community. This essay investigates the popular press. Widely discussed in French newspapers in 1878, Darwinism was connected with a sensational murder case in which two well-educated young men, Aimé Barré and Paul Lebiez, killed an elderly woman. Before his arrest, Lebiez had given a public lecture on the Darwinian "struggle for life." Competing factions of the press explicitly linked the case with Darwinism to advance either conservative or republican political agendas, which brought Darwinism into the public eye. This essay argues that Charles Darwin's instrumentalization was decisive in spreading his theory in French society. That same year, the Academy of Sciences elected Darwin to membership after six failed attempts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay pushes the history of a scientific discipline, morphology, toward a broader philosophically informed and cross-disciplinarily engaged history of knowledge. It shows that by looking at how knowledge and practices circulated between scientific disciplines (such as biology) and technoscientific ones (like architecture and design) we can better understand how (morphological) knowledge was produced. By doing so, the analysis contributes to the study of the mechanisms of knowledge exchange between the organic and the technical worlds and, more broadly, to the study of the dynamics of knowledge circulation. First, the essay analyzes the engineering studies of organic form conducted by the Austro-Hungarian botanist Raoul Heinrich Francé (1874–1943) and the Scottish polymath D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948). Subsequently, the essay moves to twenty-first-century morphogenesis. It examines the transfer of the notion of morphospace, a paleontological practice of data visualization, into biology-inspired architectural design. The conclusion deals with the broader features of knowledge transfer and circulation. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century morphologists successfully translate and transfer morphogenetic processes from nature into technical artifacts to achieve technical solutions to given problems. In the translation of organic morphogenesis into a technical process, evolution's intrinsic historical contingency was deliberately left behind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of science in modern China often explore their subjects within global or national frameworks. This essay uses data from gazetteers to address the place-based nature of Chinese agricultural science as it developed at smaller geographical scales. Information contained in gazetteers suggests that regional environmental knowledge and site-specific social networks influenced the construction and communication of scientific ideas about farming at the local level. By highlighting these dimensions of knowledge making, this essay demonstrates the benefits of using gazetteers to grapple with the importance of place in Chinese science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the preservation of prickly alkanet, a wild plant that is a constituent of Palestinian cuisine. While tracking the dominant practices of biodiversity preservation that justify the documentation and collection of plants in national and international systems, it ultimately suggests recipes rather than seeds as targets of preservation. For, in seed saving oriented toward community control of resources, knowledge of the plant begins with the ability to prepare it for the table, not with the ability to analyze it in a lab or cultivate it in a field. As a logic of biodiversity preservation, cooking thus serves as an expression of community solidarity and a counter-hegemonic form of knowledge, prioritizing the local sharing of resources and rituals above floristic nationalisms and the extractive complex of international food security. Such an approach calls into question the orientation of modern agricultural development, which has prioritized increasing yield in primary cereal crops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century witnessed the rise of zoo biology. Such a discipline might seem anchored in a specific spatial setting (that of the zoological garden), but if historians want to understand its development they should not limit their view to the confines of the zoo grounds. After all, understanding animals and their behavior at the zoo often involved thinking about them in other spaces as well. Notably, the "artificial" state of animals in captivity invited reflection on their "natural" condition in the wild. In order to study the changing relation between science performed at the zoo and in the field, this essay conceptualizes a "zoo–field border"—arguing that movements across this border are crucial to understanding practices on both sides. In particular, the essay analyzes a field expedition to the national parks of the Belgian Congo set up in 1948 by Heini Hediger, the Swiss zoologist who is often credited as the pioneer of zoo biology. Hediger's expedition, it argues, involved conceptual, methodological, and logistical border-crossing. The combination of these forms, then, ultimately enabled a rethinking of animals and their behaviors on both sides of the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the known evidence for Byzantine engagement with what are conventionally termed "alchemical" texts, theories, and practices of the Islamic world. Much of the evidence is difficult to date. Nevertheless, the aggregated direct, indirect, and circumstantial evidence suggests at least some engagement by Greek-speaking scholars throughout the Middle Ages. This engagement took various forms, from the use of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish terminology to the adaptation of whole Arabic treatises in Greek. Sometimes the Byzantine texts emphasize their Islamicate sources, and sometimes they do not mention these sources at all. The resulting picture is still fragmentary, but it indicates that medieval Greek-speaking scholars were active in the circulation of chemical knowledge and techniques in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Byzantium, therefore, should no longer be left out of research into long-term patterns in the history of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the creation of a gender identity clinic at Rikshospitalet, the National Hospital of Norway, in the early 2000s and its implications for the production of medical knowledge during that era. In the preceding decades, medical transition was overseen by an informal, self-organized, multidisciplinary team of medical experts, but this situation changed when a centralized gender identity clinic was established under psychiatric control. The essay argues that shifting institutional, societal, economic, legal, and bureaucratic circumstances redistributed expertise and authority on trans medicine. Economic framing, institutional frictions, patient activism, and media attention restricted the doctors' room for maneuver and created a scientific crisis of legitimacy in trans medicine. These processes changed medical knowledge regarding medical transition; eventually, "sex change" and, therefore, all that is denoted by "sex" became intertwined with and inseparable from the politico-bureaucratic processes of reforming a modern public health-care system and welfare state. By anchoring the analysis in the history of science and expertise, this inquiry offers a new focus on the role of bureaucratic practices in the production, structuring, and circulation of medical knowledge in the welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the seventeenth century, new varieties of flowers were created in Istanbul's many agricultural spaces. At the same time, new literary genres related to flower breeding appeared: technical "how-to" manuals, which derived from an earlier tradition of agricultural treatises; encyclopedias of the flower varieties created in Istanbul; and biographical dictionaries of Istanbul's flower breeders. Such texts, which typically bear the designation Şükūfe-nāme (Books on Flowers), attempt to prescribe note-taking habits, agricultural timelines, and observational techniques. Varieties of flowers with various shapes, sizes, and colors are attributed to the work of individual local breeders. This essay explores the role of seeds in this rich textual production in Istanbul. As things that are mobile yet can take root, seeds became objects of study during what was an era of heightened exchange and mobility in seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul. In contrast to the view holding that the history of flower seeds unfolded primarily in Ottoman exchanges with Western Europe, the case of Şükūfe-nāme works shows that seeds were technological objects with local histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As mobile and foundational entities, seeds mimic science and are an appropriate vehicle for examining its defining traits. Ubiquitous as they are, seeds come into the hands of teeming millions and are acted upon, saved, shared, and sold for profit worldwide. They throw up an unusually large cast of characters that are bearers of knowledge or knowledge makers who are located outside the confines of academic elite science. They allow us to understand and acknowledge that knowledge making could be far more deep, widespread, and pervasive than our excessive focus on academic scholar-scientists allows us to see. Seeds straddle the world of multiple historiographies around geography and identity. Overlapping with studies of sedentarism and deep agrarian societies as well as the current controversies over food sovereignty, seeds give access to a wide variety of claims and illuminate several pathways and methodologies for developing historical studies of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jesuit scientists played a key role in the establishment of the earliest warning systems for tropical cyclones in the 1870s and 1880s. Jesuit observatories and their cyclone prediction methods were unrivaled in the geopolitically and commercially competitive landscape in the Antilles and the Far East. Even Western governments and local mercantile communities in Cuba, China, and the Philippines entrusted the Jesuits with the direction of national and regional weather services in the 1880s and 1890s, while state observatories and imperial navies often surreptitiously drew on the Jesuits' forecasts for their own storm warnings. The ability of the Society of Jesus to produce, codify, and disseminate scientific knowledge is here addressed in terms of the formation of an "epistemic network" of actors sharing certain beliefs as well as a common scientific enterprise. This actor-centered network did not mean, however, that there was some center of calculation or production through which Western domination of knowledge over the periphery would take place. Quite the contrary, the case of Jesuit cyclone prediction details a specific networked activity that deepens our understanding of how specific epistemic networks can be actively engaged in the processes of circulation and globalization while also adapting, modifying, and producing prediction methods in local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay studies the scientific practices of the African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral as Black Radical Tradition challenges to historical agency. His graphs on land use and soil erosion, produced for the Portuguese colonial administration of Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, prophesied the independence of peoples otherwise put outside of history. Cabral's graphs point to the underappreciated contribution of specific forms of knowledge to the history of decolonization and challenge the historian of science to write history of Black science. This is distinct from consoling narratives of Black people in science or traditional critical accounts of science and racism. Instead, fully engaging the Black Radical Tradition, the history of Black science foregrounds scientific practices that historically enacted Black agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the eighteenth century, cabinetmakers in Canton (Guangzhou) produced a large quantity of hardwood furniture for European consumers. This essay examines the knowledge culture of these cabinetmakers, focusing on epistemic negotiations and adaptations in the process of making export furniture. While export furniture was made in European styles, cabinetmakers did not parrot European techniques of carpentry but creatively mobilized their own craft knowledge. Juxtaposing material evidence from extant pieces and the carpentry manual The Classic of Lu Ban , the essay argues that the knowledge of joinery formed the basis of a practice of artisanal translation that was material and syntactic. Offering modular rubrics for spatial handling, joinery allowed cabinetmakers to restructure and reinvent furniture with a European appearance. Tracing the interaction between an indigenous knowledge system and global trade commodities, the essay underlines the social and epistemic realignments of locally rooted craft in the achievement of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the decades after World War II, oceans were envisioned as sites of resource abundance that would underpin global development. This essay investigates Antarctic krill and its potential "surplus" as one articulation of this abundance, attending to the cultural and epistemic strategies at play in constituting this ocean abundance. Concentrating on the work of Neil Mackintosh, a world-leading British whale biologist working within governmental scientific bodies, this essay identifies temporal imaginings and sensibilities as being central to his claims around krill abundance and its seeming surplus in the context of whale stocks significantly diminished through overexploitation. Mackintosh's temporalities of abundance were generated in three overlapping and mutually reinforcing sites: the archive of the colonial scientific survey he worked for, the decades of his career, and the recovery of polar seal populations. The story of the krill surplus and the temporalities underpinning it allows for a more complex reckoning with ideas of scarcity and abundance as well as further demonstrating the need to see the temporalities at work in constituting environments and the scientific labor in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The observation that neurological illnesses follow recurrent hits to the head was tempered by the terms that first called the diseases into scientific existence: "punch-drunk," "slugnutty," "slaphappy," "goofy," "punchy," and a host of other colloquialisms accompanying class identities. Thus the discovery of disease and its medicalization ran straight into a countervailing belief about losers—losers in boxing, losers in life, losers in general. To medicalize such individuals was to fly in the face of a culture that made them jokes. Yet a subculture began to emerge around pathological understandings: first in medicine, then in journalism, then in the courts, and finally with patient accounts about illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Kentucky's immense and world-famous Mammoth Cave, this essay considers contexts from across the nineteenth century in which subterranean darkness was envisaged as a driving force in the transformation of living things. In fact, the cave was the stage for several allied discourses of "dark degeneracy" that conjured images of both generative and destructive mutability, from the generation of animals without eyes to the apparent disintegration of some kinds of human bodies and minds through exposure to the darkness. In elucidating several parallel discourses of dark degeneracy, the essay offers a distinct contribution to several bodies of scholarship by highlighting an important and hitherto neglected manifestation of an intensifying nineteenth-century focus on the how of natural processes and a growing sense of the transformative significance of the apparent cohesion of malleable bodies with their wider environments. At the same time, it evidences the influence of Mammoth Cave in forging and contributing to late nineteenth-century debates about degeneration and shows how dominant sensory hierarchies framed both popular and scientific understandings of life in the deep darkness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the twentieth century, so-called "glass diseases" seriously affected the use of scientific and technical glassware. It had become apparent by 1900 that glass, a supposedly neutral and inert material, not only interacted with its environment but also interfered with anything it contained—chemically, physically, and biologically. Starting from the assumption that modern laboratory research depends on containers that regulate the spatial, material, and epistemic enclosure of its experimental milieus and objects, this essay argues that the standardization of glass quality from the 1900s to the 1930s must be understood as a reconfiguration of a "marginal" but nonetheless constitutive element of modern laboratory environments. The aim here is thus to weave various threads together into an (un)natural history of a modern material, one that considers epistemology, technology, and ontology—or, more specifically, the changing requirements and functions of glassware in the modern laboratory, the invention of specifically adapted glass substances, and the parallel advancement of glass science and its theories of what glass actually is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How shall we judge the element of practicality or urgency for scholars working in the era of the 2030 deadline for action on climate change? This essay surveys the reaction to climate change by scholars who work with data, using the philosopher Stephen Gardiner's conceit of "corrupt institutions" to organize the approaches according to an index of pragmatic orientation. This survey will lead to the identification of some challenges for those seeking to engage the climate deadline with data, especially work making climate data more transparent, text mining to identify aspects of corruption and reform within contemporary institutions, and building infrastructure for citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the dynamics and trajectories of the Anthropocene, the single most crucial parameter of investigation is time—specifically, the interconnections and friction between multiple timescales and temporal processes. This essay outlines a possible role for the history of science in understanding the Anthropocene. The notion of the "Anthropocene" entails different historical horizons being banded together—in particular, longue durée transformations and the now-accelerating environmental and socio-epistemic changes. But the challenge of the Anthropocene for the history of science lies not only in new questions, topics, and methodological approaches: the history of science itself may gain new opportunities to use its insights and reflective potential to encourage innovative forms of scientific knowledge production. The essay argues that we need a new transdisciplinary, transformative science in order to understand the techno–Earth System from an integrative perspective. This new science of "geoanthropology" should study the technosphere as part of the techno–Earth System by integrating different disciplinary perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthropocene is the signature concept of the new discipline of Earth System science (ESS). This essay argues that ESS is, first and foremost, a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration, and it considers the advantages and disadvantages to historians of adopting this framework. The authors conclude that the epistemological framework of ESS devalues the role of historical interpretation and evinces a self-defeating tendency toward Holocene nostalgia. A historically informed response to the present environmental crisis needs to attend to historical forces that remain invisible to ESS, such as the technological agency of nondominant actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This programmatic essay argues that meaningful historical engagement with the Anthropocene begins with recognizing that the concept arises not only from geology but also from Earth System science (ESS), which has evolved to incorporate both physical systems and human systems in an integrated view of our planet. It makes the case that this holistic understanding alters both the science and the history of the Anthropocene by introducing a novel form of human agency: Earth System agency. This radical new form of agency does not eclipse the individual and collective forms of agency that have always interacted with the environment but adds to them in complex and sometimes uncomfortable ways. It challenges us to develop a science-induced Anthropocene historiography and a humanities-induced Anthropocene science. The history of science is well positioned to play a dialectical role in developing a "critical friendship" between Anthropocene history and Anthropocene science—a process in which the history of science will likely be transformed as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]