History of Science最新文献

{"title":"Global circulation of low-end expertise: Knowledge, hierarchy, and labor migration in a Burmese oilfield.","authors":"Chao Ren","doi":"10.1177/00732753231189442","DOIUrl":"10.1177/00732753231189442","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the phenomenon of the \"global circulation of low-end expertise\" through an exploration of the social dynamics surrounding American oil drillers who migrated from the Pennsylvania oil region to British colonial Burma during the early 1900s to the mid-1930s. These working-class drillers, with practical knowledge in oil drilling acquired through familial and community networks, played a crucial role in operating mechanized oil wells and providing geological expertise in colonial Burma. Positioned between labor-intensive agricultural economies in colonial Asia and the higher echelons of British colonial society, these drillers occupied an intermediate social location. Despite their indispensable expertise, they were marginalized due to their lower social standing, leading to their expertise being disregarded by their superiors and forgotten over time. By understanding the complexities of the \"global circulation of low-end expertise,\" this study sheds light on the social construction and erasure of the expertise held by these working-class drillers, revealing overlooked aspects of global histories of science and labor and highlighting the need to reassess dominant historical narratives on knowledge-labor.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 4","pages":"561-587"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138464045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Historiographies of science and labor: From past perspectives to future possibilities.","authors":"Lissa Roberts, Seth Rockman, Alexandra Hui","doi":"10.1177/00732753231209023","DOIUrl":"10.1177/00732753231209023","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article offers suggestions for what a labor history of science might look like and what it might accomplish. It does so by first reviewing how historians of science have analyzed the history of both \"science as labor\" and \"science and labor\" since the 1930s. It then moves on to discuss recent historiographical developments in both the history of science and labor history that together provide an analytical frame for further research. The article ends by projecting into the future, considering how a labor history of science might help us grapple with connecting our understanding of the past with the challenges of today and tomorrow.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 4","pages":"448-474"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10693716/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138464046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unnamed, not unskilled: Toward a new labor history of pharmacy.","authors":"Zachary Dorner","doi":"10.1177/00732753231187477","DOIUrl":"10.1177/00732753231187477","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>By recovering the dependent, often enslaved, laborers who helped to make European medicines commercially available in the New England colonies, this article offers a new history of early American pharmaceutical knowledge and production. It does so by considering the life and labor of an unnamed, enslaved assistant who was said to make tinctures, elixirs, and other common remedies in a 1758 letter between two business partners, Silvester Gardiner, a successful surgeon and apothecary in Boston, Massachusetts, and William Jepson, his former apprentice, in Hartford, Connecticut. Using strategies from slavery and critical archive studies, as well as from social history and the history of medicine, this article emphasizes the materiality and embodiment of pharmaceutical production and follows fragmentary evidence beyond the business archive to reverse the systemic erasure of enslaved and indentured laborers from the records of eighteenth-century manufacturers of medicines. The medicine trades of men like Gardiner and Jepson appear more reliant upon dependent laborers - named and unnamed - who not only performed rote tasks but brought their experience and judgment to their labors as well. Their contributions could be obviously medical (preparing remedies) or more ambiguous (stoking fires, shipping goods), but these actions together constituted early modern pharmacy, enabled the expansion of the transatlantic medicine trade, and laid the foundations for the more self-sufficient and industrialized pharmacy that developed in the nineteenth century. Centering the skill and knowledge among subordinated laborers in one facet of an emergent transatlantic care economy affirms the entanglement of slavery and science and underscores the necessity of asking new questions of old sources.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 4","pages":"522-545"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138464082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Maszyny Matematyczne, women, and computing: The birth of computers in the Polish communist era.","authors":"Carla Petrocelli","doi":"10.1177/00732753221121502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221121502","url":null,"abstract":"The history of computing usually focuses on achievements in Western universities and research centers and is mostly about what happened in the United States and Great Britain. However, in Eastern Europe, particularly in war-torn Poland, where there was very little state funding, many highly original hardware and software projects were initiated. The small number of publications available to us, especially those in English, led to the belief that technological progress was the result of research carried out in Western countries alone. This article aims to fill this knowledge gap by focusing on the numerous research projects initiated in Polish universities and computer industries that unfortunately turned into dead ends as the result of socialist policies. These are references that cannot be ignored, not only for a historical reconstruction of the evolution of technology but also with regard to the social effects recorded in Poland immediately after the Second World War. The communist ideology, which pursued gender equality policies after the end of the war, encouraged women to pursue education, enabling the many female students enrolled in mathematics degree courses to specialize in “Maszyny Matematyczne” (mathematical machines) and become, like men, experts in computer programming and design. As well as highlighting the role that Poland played in the nascent “computer science” and providing detailed information on what women contributed, this article will explain why the success of the Polish computer industry was limited due to the nonexistent coordination between the communist states (Comecon).","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"409-435"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10212421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Scaling down the Earth's history: Visual materials for popular education by Nérée Boubée (1806-1862).","authors":"Silvia F de M Figueirôa","doi":"10.1177/00732753221089812","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221089812","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Spatial and temporal scales are essential components of geological sciences; both are almost always imbricated in complex ways, challenging geoscientific knowledge among nonspecialists and students. The present paper focuses on the efforts made by the French naturalist Simon-Suzanne Nérée Boubée (1806-62) regarding popular education on geology. Though Boubée is poorly known nowadays, he experienced some prestige during his lifetime. He worked as an independent teacher, offering private as well as free public courses. Boubée, as a nineteenth-century science popularizer, repeatedly insisted on his disposition for \"spreading science for all.\" He extensively published books and journals on geology, all aimed at popularizing geological scientific knowledge, considered to be of paramount relevance. This paper analyzes three visual examples extracted from his works: the <i>Tableau Mnémonique des Terrains Primitifs, destiné au géologue voyageur</i>, <i>avec son explication</i> (1831), the <i>Tableau de l'État du Globe à ses différents âges</i> (1832), and the <i>Tableau figuratif de la structure minérale du globe, ou résumé synoptique du Cours de géognosie de M. N. Boubée</i> (1839), supplemented with images from the travel guide <i>Deux Promenades au Mont Doré</i> (1834). Our goal is to understand Boubée's efforts to synthesize information, scaling down geologic time and space into foldable materials that made geological knowledge cognitively and materially accessible to laypeople.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"383-408"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10528740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Voyages of maintenance: Exploration, infrastructure, and modernity on the Krusenstern-Lisianskii circumnavigation between Russia and Japan from 1803 to 1806.","authors":"Simon Werrett","doi":"10.1177/00732753211060186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211060186","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Against the common association of voyages of exploration with discovery and the arrival of modernity, this essay argues that maintenance and repair were essential to the success of such voyages and that maintenance and innovation are best seen as fundamentally integrated. Using the Russian circumnavigatory voyage of Adam von Krusenstern and Urey Lisianskii in 1803-7 as a case study, the essay explores the diverse forms and roles of infrastructure and repair work in enabling a voyage of exploration, and reveals the tensions and debates that considerations of maintenance evoked among ships' officers, crews, and the peoples they encountered.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"338-359"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/98/11/10.1177_00732753211060186.PMC10464720.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10212368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Heavenly spirit or material being? Science on electricity at the turn of the 19th century in Poland.","authors":"Piotr Urbanowicz","doi":"10.1177/00732753221074607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221074607","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In my paper I follow the emergence of the science of electricity in Poland. I believe that the science of electricity established in 1777 served as a new social program. Through the introduced translations, this science was intended to create a new social imaginary and social relations. I describe two interrelated processes: the social construction of the science of electricity, and negotiations between secular and religious definitions of electricity. In the first part of the article I show that both processes were related to each other and contributed to hybrid interpretations of electricity - as a \"material being\" and \"spirit of the world.\" In the second part of the paper I pay attention to the efforts made by Jan and Jędrzej Śniadecki to secularize the science of electricity in Vilnius. I follow the metaphor of 'laboratory' used in their works in order to describe the natural phenomena. I claim that Jędrzej Śniadecki established not only a new theory of electricity (a \"radiant being\"), but in fact a new understanding of social space. I point out that he did that by transferring scientific practices into the cultural space.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"360-382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10528731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The instrumental Brahmin and the \"half-caste\" computer: Astronomy and colonial rule in Madras, 1791-1835.","authors":"S Prashant Kumar","doi":"10.1177/00732753221090435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221090435","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>What did science make possible for colonial rule? How was science in turn marked by the knowledge and practices of those under colonial rule? Here I approach these questions via the social history of Madras Observatory. Constructed in 1791 by the East India Company, the observatory was to provide local time to mariners and served as a clearinghouse for the company's survey and revenue administration. The astronomical work of Madras' Brahmin assistants relied upon their knowledge of <i>jyotiśāstra</i> [Sanskrit astronomy/astrology], and can be seen as a specialized form of the kind of South Indian scribal labor and knowledge that also staffed the company's tax offices. If at Greenwich the division of labor meant observatory work bore resemblances to the factory and the accounts office, in Madras, astronomy and accounting drew on similar labor forms because they were part of the same enterprise. But the company did not just adapt preexisting forms of labor, it also attempted to produce its own at a school built near the observatory to train \"half-caste\" orphans as apprentice surveyors and assistant computers. The school, staffed by the Brahmins, drew upon knowledge and pedagogical practice associated with the <i>tinnai</i>, the schools in which upper-caste children learned to read, write, and calculate. For a time, the observatory's social order was literally \"half-caste.\" The paper also considers how the relationship between caste, status, and instrument was reflected in the visual and material culture of the observatory, such as in Indian-language inscriptions on its central pillar. For company astronomers, the measurement of time meant reworking the relationships among the Indian past, the colonial present, and an imperial posterity. Science under colonial rule spanned multiple temporal and social registers because it was the result of negotiations between the demands of political economy and the knowledge and practices of colonized others.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"308-337"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10466975/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10156059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Put a mark on the errors\": Seventeenth-century medicine and science.","authors":"Alice Leonard,&nbsp;Sarah E Parker","doi":"10.1177/00732753221135046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221135046","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Error is a neglected epistemological category in the history of science. This neglect has been driven by the commonsense idea that its elimination is a general good, which often renders it invisible or at least not worth noticing. At the end of the sixteenth century across Europe, medicine increasingly focused on \"popular errors,\" a genre where learned doctors addressed potential patients to disperse false belief about treatments. By the mid-seventeenth century, investigations into popular error informed the working methodology of natural philosophers, rather than just physicians. In 1646, Thomas Browne published <i>Pseudodoxia Epidemica</i>, a large volume on popular error. Despite Browne's formal training as a physician, this work examined only a few medical errors and instead aspired to be an encyclopedia of error. <i>Pseudodoxia Epidemica</i> was highly popular, running to six editions, and was known by the Fellows of the Royal Society. Influenced by Browne, alongside Bacon's theory of the idols, natural philosophic practice in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century developed a focus on error that revised traditional attention to the discovery of knowledge. Fellows such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke proposed new ways to secure truth under the far-reaching influence of Bacon's refutations of \"natural human reason\" distorted by false idols, of syllogistic logic, and of \"theories,\" his label for traditional philosophical systems that bias thought toward falsity. In three parts, this article traces the progression in early modern scientific approaches to handling error, and especially medical error - from physicians' efforts to identify and eradicate it through collaborative effort, to the striking tension in Browne's work between seeking to eliminate error while also showing a marked tolerance for it, to the Royal Society's Baconian objective of instrumentalizing error to find truth. Error emerges as its own epistemic category that serves as a driving force toward knowledge production.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"287-307"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/cc/06/10.1177_00732753221135046.PMC10464649.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10212898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Affective geographies: Family and friendship in the production of scientific knowledge.","authors":"Dena Goodman","doi":"10.1177/00732753211059957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211059957","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Through case studies of two early nineteenth-century French geologists, this article shows how relations of family and friendship were integral to determining where science took place. Digging up the traces of what I call the \"affective geographies\" of individual scientists that are entangled with their intellectual itineraries, I show how the practice of science is embedded in such affective relations and thus in everyday life.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"236-265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9628399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}