Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences

Recent history resonates with current public health conversations. Check out 2021's Essay section on Pandemic Subjects. Dora Vargha's short article "The Vaccine" says it all: "Vaccines are technologies of trust...and trust can fray at any point." online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article...

Weart's work shows how funding in the cold war increased government support for science deemed important for security and international collaboration, but the Regan era politicized wide swaths of research- especially climate science- drying up support and reducing funds. History.Exhausting.Amirite?

Weart's article details the link between funding and politicization of climate change, tracking his funding sources from its small start during the International Geophysical Year to funding by NOAA, the Department of Energy, NSF, and the USGS between 1977 and 1980. But that bubble also burst.

Today is a great day to read Spencer Weart's paper on funding at Mauna Loa Observatory: doi.org/10.1525/hsps... From the #vault, it begins "Funding is obviously a necessity for scientific research, but the details of the funding of a given program have rarely been studied in detail."

Volume 55 Issue 1 | Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences | University of California Press

Find all these articles here, plus Shin and DeVorkin's article on the half century long battle to develop a national planetarium for the US. Taken together, this Volume speaks heavily to the politics of science in the 20th century. online.ucpress.edu/hsns/issue/5...

Using these papers, the authors show how Wilson positioned his science in the political climate of the Cold War, casting his critics as enemies of both science and the State. Other essays examine the impact of Sociobiology on ecological thought and its legacy today.

Each essay examines the debates and legacy of E.O. Wilson's publication. This collection of essays is particularly rich, as many of the scholars used Wilson's recently opened papers at the Library of Congress.

It's very easy to think that scientists are politically united. But the newest issue of HSNS is a close look at the politics of science. Vol 55 Issue 1 contains 11 short essays looking at the legacy of E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology at 50.

Thought you'd find this useful @nzjh.bsky.social @conteurohistory.bsky.social ‪@euroreviewhistory.bsky.social‬ @isisjournal.bsky.social @asia-pacific-echr.bsky.social @enghistrev.bsky.social @hsnatsci.bsky.social @jmormonhist.bsky.social @jofvictculture.bsky.social @jbritishstudies.bsky.social

Volume 54 Issue 5 | Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences | University of California Press

All of these essays are worth the read. I do believe that reading them together will help you think clearly about AI in the academy and your role in shaping that role. online.ucpress.edu/hsns/issue/5...

And Jennifer Robertson suggests new forms of fieldwork that will help scholars better understand and process the rapid changes in robotics and automated life in the 21st century. Joseph Martin, the editor of the journal, finishes with an essay that reflects on the role of editors in this new world.

Damien P. Williams suggests that issues with AI "scholarship" intertwines with academic publish or perish culture- pushing scholars to accept the slight of hand that interprets publishing with knowledge production. Instead, he suggests we interrogate what knowledge means outside of this system.

" In the face of such a profound threat from AI, researchers should take a leaf out of the Luddites’ playbook by intervening and organizing wherever possible to prevent automation imposed by commercial publishers and analytics companies."

Check out Alex Csiszar, Nicole Howard, and Samuel A. Moore's essays. They historicize scientific publication, quick production of written materials, and the development of automation. Moore uses Hobsbawm's historical account of Luddites to call for an intervention.

Melinda Baldwin and Brigid Vance have put together 6 short essays examining AI in academic publishing through a historical lens. And it is calming me down!

Volume 54 Issue 5 | Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences | University of California Press

At the beginning of the semester, if questions of AI in academia are stressing you out, could I suggest reading through our most recent set of essays? online.ucpress.edu/hsns/issue/5...

When Scientists Disagree: Carl von Heß, Karl von Frisch, and the Study of Controversies In science studies, history and philosophy of science, and history of science, scientific controversies are supposed to reveal how science works. Controversy, in this sense, is not primarily a researc...

read about it here: online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article...

Hoffman says that "it can be said that controversies are often treated as similar to natural experiments, which, with no planned intervention, reveal elementary attributes of scientific knowledge production."

Christoph Hoffmann's article in the most recent Issue of HSNS looks at an "instructive controversy"- the debate between Carl von Hess and Karl von Frisch regarding color vision in fish and bees.

Tracing National Origins, Debating Ethnic Homogeneity: Population Genetics and the Politics of National Identity in South Korea This article examines the interaction between human population genetics and the reconstruction of national identities and histories. Since the first use of mitochondrial DNA analysis of human origins ...

Our next paper speaking to this is Jaehwan Hyun's article from September 2019 on the "politics of national identity in South Korea" online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article...

Accidents of Geography: Historicizing Genetic Cartographies of the Middle East Over the past two decades, human geneticists have substantially embraced the concept of “biogeographical ancestry” to account for the racial, ethnic, and linguistic categories they use to analyze and ...

The first paper is by Elise Burton from February 2024. Her paper traces the way that cartography shifted as did ideas about race and Turkish identity. online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article...

Good day to all our new followers! Here are two papers from our #archives on the intersections of science and national identity. A good way to think about how science has aided the politicization of race and culture over time.

The pathological history of weather and climate modification: Three cycles of promise and hype ABSTRACT. The checkered history of weather and climate modification exhibits a modicum of promise and an excess of hype. This paper examines two completed historical cycles: the first, dating from 183...

James Fleming's article on promises about weather and climate modification is an important read these days: online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article...
Fleming shows the cycle of boom and bust surrounding ideas of weather modification. Check it out!
#archive #WeatherModification

The Black Androids: A Chrestomathy This article offers some key terms for thinking through the history of the Black Androids, a group of racialized automata, created between the mid–sixteenth century and the late twentieth-century, tha...

Read the essay here: online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article...

This collaborative essay is an amazing example of how scholars are building intellectual communities in the history of science.
@ejonesimhotep
Awa Hanane Diagne Emily Grenon Syeda Hasan Holly K.M. Johnstone
@AlexanderOfford
Neve Ostry Young Sarai Rudder

The essay unpacks these layers of hiddenness- what does it mean for artifacts to be built to hide something and then be hidden away ? How can historians access these forms of underground knowing to get at a deeper understanding of Black technological ingenuity?

The section also shows how these hidden objects were themselves hiding Black technological ingenuity. Black inventors, engineers, and scientists , often underground themselves, but were a "space of imagination and a site of Black world-making."

"The androids performed a range of functions—entertainment, ridicule, voyeurism, mysticism, obfuscated desire. But they were also part of an effort to create, maintain, and spread what Evelyn Hammonds has called the myth of “Black technological disingenuity---..."

The essay uses chrestomathy to work through all the ways that these androids functioned and still function today. The section entitled "underground" shows how these objects often remain hidden in museums because of their racist overtones.

Today is a great day to read "The Black Androids: A Chrestomathy" in the latest issue of HSNS. A Chrestomathy is a group of readings compiled to help a student learn a language. The authors of this essay use this framework to work through their study of black androids.