As another
school year begins, the HSTM blog emerges from summertime hibernation looking
for a new editor. If you’re a current HSTM student and would be interested in
editing the blog as this year’s Communications Coordinator, please let me know.
HSTM students are going to be busy these next few months, with a number of conferences coming up. Keep reading to see some dates and abstracts for upcoming HSTM student presentations. If you are presenting something yourself that doesn’t appear in this post, let me know, and I’ll get your abstract posted.
HSTM students are going to be busy these next few months, with a number of conferences coming up. Keep reading to see some dates and abstracts for upcoming HSTM student presentations. If you are presenting something yourself that doesn’t appear in this post, let me know, and I’ll get your abstract posted.
- September 14-17 (this weekend!). The European Society for the History of Science conference in London. Anna Amramina will be speaking (alongside Susan Jones) in a panel entitled "Expeditions and Imaginaries in the Russian/Soviet Borderlands." The panel abstract is below:
Bridging Europe and Asia, the vast lands that have been under Russian and Soviet control were the 'living laboratories' of generations of scientists. How did Russian and Soviet scientists navigate political, environmental, and sociocultural entanglements while on expedition in the far reaches of the empire? To explore these and other questions, our case studies include: organizing Russian natural history expeditions and border crossings in the early 19th century; fin de siecle disease ecology expeditions in Central Asia; early 20th-c. Russian/Soviet climate science expeditions; and comparative Soviet geological fieldwork after the Great Patriotic War. While most Anglophone histories of science and environmental histories have presented a unified picture of Tsarist and Soviet government control, our case studies reveal a much more nuanced situation for scientific thinking and practice beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg. Producing knowledge and creating imaginaries for the borderlands was the work of geologists, biologists, anthropologists and others on multi-disciplinary expeditions that were an almost continuous feature of Russian science before, during and after the revolution. We present scientific work across time, borders, disciplinary and political differences, gender and ethnicity; and we bring new voices into the global history of science and environment. By spanning the 19th and 20th centuries and seeking to situate our historical case studies in trans-national context, we join a growing movement to integrate Russian/Soviet scientists' work and thinking into the broader historiography. - November 1-4. The History of Science Society annual meeting in Seattle. Adam Fix has organized a panel entitled "Art-Science: Premodern Theory and Practice Entangled" and will be presenting a paper entitled ""Esperienza," Teacher of All Things: The Musical Art-Science of Vincenzo Galilei." If you missed his similar talk at Junto this year (due perhaps to something as silly as a bit of blizzard), you owe it to yourself to attend. His panel and paper abstracts are below:
Panel: In recent years, historians of both science and the arts have recognized the vital role of craft knowledge and artisanal practice in the development of the premodern sciences. Nevertheless, unraveling the complex relationships between speculative/intellectual and practical/artisanal traditions in the premodern world has often proven to be a maddening task. This panel begins with the conviction that these domains cannot—and indeed should not—be neatly divided, and embraces their nebulous and permeable boundaries not as an obstacle but a promising opportunity. Hence, we focus on “art-science”: theory-laden crafts and handiwork, or craft-like sciences and philosophy, that have fallen through the cracks of conventional historiographical categories. This encompasses such topics as instrumentalized modes of representation and models of human vision, the cross-cultural exchange of Renaissance artisanal epistemology, and the mathematical-experimental science of musical composition. Though we center on Western European sciences in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we consider the broader implications of art-science as a form of knowledge that crosses and blurs disciplinary and cultural boundaries, inviting new possibilities for teaching and experiencing the history of science. Through these studies, this panel will circumvent anachronistic dichotomies between science and craft, challenge conceptual barriers within the history of science as a discipline, and demonstrate how the knowledge and practices of artisans were embedded in the sciences of the premodern world.
Paper: Was Vincenzo Galilei—composer, lutanist, and father of Galileo—an experimental scientist? Historians of science and music alike have agonized over this question. In 1589, Vincenzo recounted observations, taken from sonorous objects including lute strings and organ pipes, that seemed to contradict classical laws of harmony. Intriguingly, he claimed to have obtained these results from “the teacher of all things”: esperienza delle cose maestra. Vincenzo’s word esperienza has been translated as “experience” or “experiment” based on whether it appeared in practical contexts—dealing with composition and performance—or speculative contexts—concerning the natural cause of musical consonance. My talk reinterprets Vincenzo’s approach to music as a dual speculative/practical research program. Extending beyond scientific experimentation as usually defined, Vincenzo’s notion of esperienza entailed a balancing of mathematical reasoning, sense perception, and instrumental skill that bridged the chasm between musical sciences and arts. Just as Vincenzo used instruments to disprove contemporary theories of harmony, he implored musicians to deploy esperienza towards the composition of vera musica, or the “true music” given in nature. In short, Vincenzo proffered a musical art-science in which theory and practice converged towards the formation of natural knowledge. His vision of esperienza would inspire many experimental philosophers in the following century, most notably his son. My talk, by investigating the musical roots of experimental philosophy, demonstrates how entangled premodern speculative science and musical practice truly were.
Anna Amramina will also be presenting at HSS. Her paper is entitled ""Thank You for Transformers": The Post-WWII American-Soviet Scientific Exchange Program." Its abstract is below:
In the first decade of the Cold War, scientific dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union was reduced to occasional contacts at conferences. As scientific practices became more collaborative and global, two of the leading academic communities barely enjoyed any communication.
The situation called for changes for several reasons. International scientific societies were gaining weight in the global community, and the US and the USSR sought representation in them. Competition between Western and Eastern Bloc scientists and recognition of recent accomplishments were a matter of national pride as well as a facet of the Cold War rivalry. Establishing a bilateral diplomatic relationship implied opening a channel of scientific communication in the name of peaceful coexistence. Competing, concealing, and sharing information went hand in hand.
As the program continued, it was less and less controlled by political forces or guided by diplomatic motivations. It was increasingly shaped by research initiatives from within the academic community, focusing on doing science together. US-USSR exchanges were fueled by subversive scientific grassroots action, defusing the Cold War tension in a manner specific to science as a social institution.
This talk will explore the dynamics of US-USSR scientific exchanges in the 1950s – 1980s, as they were shaped by Cold War politics, international science, bureaucratic challenges, security issues, and cultural differences. It will also demonstrate the informal and individual side of scientific exchanges, from professional interests to opportunities for personal contacts.
I will be presenting at the same panel as Anna ("Physics in the 20th Century"), with a paper entitled "Scientific Peace Entrepreneurship: The Pugwash Organization and Resistance to Biological Weapons Research, 1957-1971." (The reader is invited to look for how much either of our papers have to do with the history of physics). My abstract is below:
This paper focuses on the construction of a transnational community of scientific critics of biological weapons research in the late 1950s and 1960s. First initiated in 1957, the Pugwash Conferences were a transnational venue for scientists to discuss and criticize the Cold War arms race, which emerged as an increasingly important element of informal Cold War diplomacy as the 1960s progressed. Though the organization which coordinated the conferences was dominated by Anglo-American and Soviet physicists principally concerned with the nuclear arms race, these leaders actively sought to construct transnational networks of critical experts on other weapons of mass destruction, especially biological weapons. Beginning in the late 1950s, Pugwash leaders successful enlisted biologists, epidemiologists, and physicians like Martin Kaplan and Matthew Meselson to construct this community of expertise, which in turn served as an influential liminal space for critics of biological weapons research and contributed to the unilateral American renunciation of the biological weapons in 1969, and the negotiation of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972. The significance of Pugwash in Cold War diplomacy has been documented by Matthew Evangelista, but his focus on a few case studies of activism leaves a scholarly lacuna in Pugwash’s influential opposition to biological weapons. Drawing on the papers of Pugwash leaders and activists, my paper fills this lacuna, focusing on the twin questions of how a physicists’ organization so effectively constructed a community of biologists, and how this community constructed an authoritative body of critical knowledge in the face of pervasive military secrecy.
Macey Flood will be presenting in the "Medicine, Gender, and Empire" panel. Her paper is entitled "Claiming Care: Medical Caregiving and Treaty Claims in the Western Great Lakes ." Her abstract is below:
Throughout much of the nineteenth-century in Ojibwe communities in the western Great Lakes of the United States, community members participated in a medically plural environment, seeking medical care from within their own communities as well as from French and Scots-Irish fur traders, New England Protestant missionaries, and federally-affiliated physicians at forts. Medical care circulated between settlers, traders, and Ojibwe communities, both instantiating social bonds and inflaming epistemic and religious differences.
This paper argues that while often overlooked in the historiography of nineteenth-century Native spaces in the Midwest, health and healing were central material concerns in these mixed colonial spaces, and as such health and healthiness became slippery frameworks for power relationships between Ojibwe community members, missionaries, traders, and Indian agents. Chronic and acute illnesses and injuries brought these diverse social groups into intimate contact and shaped their political, economic, and religious ventures. The entanglement of physical health with both material and cosmological consequence framed which practices and whose labor qualified as medical and whose body qualified as healthy. This paper draws from nineteenth-century economic claims on land-cessation treaties from 1837 and 1855 to examine how various claimants, including white and mixed or married-in families, scripted medical care as superstitious, scientific, or social, operationalizing medical care as an economic and political good while simultaneously attesting to the social malleability of medical caregiving. - November 8-11. The American Society for Legal History conference in Houston. David Korostyshevsky will be presenting a paper entitled "Inquisitions of the Mind: Intoxication, Lunacy Trials, and Property Ownership in New Jersey, 1820-1860." His abstract is below:
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the loss of mental soundness could result in a landowner’s property being assigned to a guardian by the state court. While historians have begun to examine the growing role of mental capacity in early American legal proceedings, the specific relationship between the mind, intoxication, and the law within this process has not yet been extensively studied. Using a series of surviving Chancery Court lunacy cases in New Jersey (NJ) State Archive, this paper examines the intersection of early medical understandings of intoxication, the legal machinery surrounding lunacy cases, and the legal implications of property ownership in cases of mental incapacity brought about by drinking. These proceedings were shaped by the new field of medical jurisprudence, which regarded alcohol as a physical poison that taken repeatedly, degraded the body’s physical capacity for mental soundness. As a result, the habitual drinker eventually lost the ability for volitional behavior, a fallen (most often) man incapable of moral behavior that threatened the body politic. Petitioners would request that the state Chancellor issue a writ de lunatico inquirendo, which empowered local sheriffs to convene twenty-four-person juries to examine alleged lunatic. While most of these cases stated that the causes of insanity were unknown, a growing number of them blamed excessive intoxication. In 1853, a new law in NJ specifically differentiated lunacy inquisitions from inquisitions into habitual drunkenness, making them a specific new form of legal proceeding. Looking past traditional markers of alcohol regulation in antebellum American such as the progress of prohibition and licensing laws, these cases reveal a different kind of social regulation. Blending medico-legal knowledge with moral judgement, inquisitions into habitual drunkenness reified the relationship between mental soundness, property ownership, and individual responsibility as essential cornerstones of personhood and citizenship in the New Republic.
