This paper provides an account of a specific operation – the removal of the thymus gland (thymectomy) to treat the rare neurological condition myasthenia gravis – from its first performance in 1936, by the American surgeon Alfred Blalock, to the publication in 2016 of an international multicentre randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the technique. Thymectomy was the subject of a transatlantic controversy in the 1950s, in which the main players were the English surgeon Geoffrey Keynes, and American neurologists and surgeons from New York, Boston, and the Mayo Clinic. The resolution of this controversy involved the use of increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques, but also crucially other influences including the social transformation of thoracic surgery, and competition between the leading American centres. The consensus achieved after this controversy was challenged in the late 1970s, eventually prompting the implementation of a trial acceptable to twenty-first-century evidence-based medicine. This account will demonstrate that surgical innovation in the period covered required increasing attention to the statistical basis of patient selection and outcome evaluation; that the processes of technical innovation cannot be regarded as separate from developments in the professional culture of surgery, and that one of the consequences of these changes has been the gradual eclipse of the prestigious autonomous surgeon.

Social scientists have long been interested in elite cohesion in American society, recognizing its potential implications for democracy and governance. While empirical research has focused on corporate elites and, in particular, on cohesion derived from shared board memberships, cohesion among those in the highest positions in the American state and historical change in that cohesion have been little studied. Drawing on a novel dataset of the career histories of 2,221 people who were appointed to these elite positions between 1898 and 1998, I examine whether administrative elites, prior to their elite appointment, attended the same educational institutions or worked in the same agencies of the federal government at the same time. I find evidence of increasing elite cohesion during the twentieth century. Educational cohesion increases significantly in the three decades following the World War II and then declines slightly toward the end of the century. This increase goes hand in hand with a change from college to graduate education as the primary site generating educational cohesion. Federal government workplace cohesion increases markedly in the 1930s and 1940s and then remains high. As people are appointed to different organizations within the American state, their educational and workplace connections create inter-agency networks that, it is expected, facilitate mutual understanding and coordination and thus help integrate the American administrative state.

This article examines the pioneering contributions of a generation of women civil servants, diplomats, and intellectuals—referred to as Cepalinas—to economic thought at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) between the late 1960s and early 1980s. These women experts, including statisticians, economists, sociologists, and demographers, played a critical role in reshaping CEPAL’s development agenda by advocating for the integration of gender perspectives into regional policies. Through extensive fieldwork and data collection, they highlighted the economic and social contributions of women, particularly those from marginalised communities, and challenged the prevailing male-dominated models of development. Despite the progress made following the 1975 UN International Conference on Women, the Cepalinas often remained on the periphery of institutional power and have been largely overlooked in the historiography. This article brings their work to the forefront, analysing their publications and mission reports to reveal how their efforts transformed both the Commission’s economic frameworks and broader global development policies.

In a private 1972 report to the Director of the National Park Service, Jack Anderson, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, confessed that “we are apprehensive that their proposal would ultimately end up with the complete slaughter of all bison, as occurred on the Crow Indian Reservation.”1 For decades, livestock producers at the local and national level pressured park officials to eliminate a specific disease—brucellosis caused by Brucella abortus—from Yellowstone’s buffalo herds. Following World War II, governments targeted this bacterial contagion in American domestic and wild animal populations to improve public health and livestock producers’ profits. Symptoms of brucellosis, which humans can catch from other mammalian hosts, vary across species. For domestic cattle, it can cause spontaneous abortions and, in rare cases, death. Buffalo seem largely unaffected by brucellosis but for humans, the bacterial infection can cause a plethora of chronic and debilitating symptoms.2

This article examines a contentious, failed unionization drive among 140 Latino cemetery workers in the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles between 1988 and 1991. In exploring the bitter fight between Archbishop (later Cardinal) Roger Mahony and the workers and their hopeful union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), this piece centers the voices of cemetery workers as they fought for dignity and a recognition of the spiritual and human significance of their labors within an increasingly commodified and corporatized cemetery industry. These workers’ struggle also highlights important, but underexplored, twin transformations in American labor, faith politics, and culture in the late twentieth century: intensifying unionization efforts at religious institutions (such as cemeteries, schools, and hospitals) and an attendant fracturing and remaking of labor-Catholic alliances.

During the First World War, British military bands went on tours to Paris (1917) and Italy (1918) to generate support for the Allied war effort. These ‘propaganda tours’ marked the culmination of a trend that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century when military musicians assumed the role of cultural envoys of the state. With retreat from ‘splendid isolation’ at the turn of the century, the nascent entente cordiale witnessed a burgeoning relationship between British and French military bands. While the impetus for these tours came from outside government, the Foreign Office’s cancellation of a tour to Germany in 1907 against King Edward VII’s wishes shows that these activities were considered more than benign gestures of international musical co-operation. After over two years of war, professional propagandists harnessed the mass appeal of military music by organizing concerts designed to reverse dwindling morale and present a unified Allied war effort. Although it is hard to assess their effectiveness, contemporary accounts and similar missions in the interwar period suggest that they met their objectives. By consulting a wide range of materials, from concert reviews to diplomatic correspondence, this article aims to bridge the gaps between political, military, and cultural history by showing the relevance of military music to all three sub-fields.

Built in Gif-sur-Yvette in the 1950s, the phytotron of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique provided plant physiologists with a set of enclosed growth rooms in which several climatic constituents of the environment could be simultaneously and separately controlled. This article examines the polyvalence of the French phytotron to explore the economic and political entanglements of experimental reasoning in mid-twentieth-century plant physiology. As Gif scientists embraced phytotrons as a means for developing an ‘experimental bioclimatology’, not only did they introduce into the laboratory an understanding of climate as a complex of agents likely to affect plant life, but also they sought to map scientific findings on productive pursuits during a period of intense agricultural modernization. The horticultural and agronomic applications envisaged were aimed at the timing of climate-sensitive biological events, but also at the expansion of productive areas within and outside metropolitan France, particularly in the context of late colonial and international dry-land development agendas. This case study of phytotronists’ agricultural imagination highlights a techno-scientific conception of climate steeped in biology, tied to the limits and potential of plant life in time and space, and regarded as either a deficiency to be corrected or a resource to be harnessed.

After the two world wars, numerous Germans were forcibly removed or fled their homelands in eastern Europe, resettling in Germany. In both postwar periods, the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany established compensation systems to indemnify the material losses and damages suffered by these refugees: the Gewaltschädengesetze (Violent Damages Laws) of 1921 and the Lastenausgleichsgesetz (Equalization of Burdens Law) of 1952. The article offers a unique comparative insight into the functioning of the two compensation mechanisms, examining six cases of applicants (or their heirs) who lost their homes twice in their lives and applied for compensation twice: first after the end of the First World War and then following the Second World War. The diachronic comparison reveals the complex nature of German national belonging, the persistence of the term Volksgemeinschaft in modern German history, and the role of class status in the context of compensation after both wars.

This article analyses the depictions of immunity and immunological functions employed in proprietary medical advertising in British newspapers between 1890 and 1940. Using marketing copy to gain insights into the ways immunity was presented to the public and normalised outside of medical institutions and publications, I offer four main areas of discussion. First, I present an analysis of the ways advertisements evoked both natural and artificial immunity in their marketing copy, thereby affording us insights into the ways immunity was made palatable both to those supportive of and opposed to vaccinations. I then unpack the ways in which this advertising copy often emphasised immunity rather than the immunological, that is, presented immunity as resistance to infection achieved by purchasing particular brands, rather than as part of a defensive process taking place at a cellular level. Third, I examine the ways in which advertisements engaged with futurity and drew on a narrative of social exclusion that pitted created communities of the immune against the non-immune. Finally, I analyse the ways in which immunity was used to connect the biological and the psychological, looking particularly at the ways immunity against worry was sold to the public.

How does one prepare for flight? Is it possible to plan for such a disruptive event? This article explores a unique publication project established precisely for that purpose: migration manuals published by a German-Jewish organization to support the masses of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s. These manuals consolidated elaborate information from all over the world to prepare Jews for impending displacement. They encompassed not only essential details but also impressions, recommendations, and complaints. The manuals’ editors assembled reports from individuals already settled in refuge, generating a collaborative self-help effort on a global scale. Analyzing their content, this article shows that the process of guiding readers into forced migration extended in this case beyond technical migration procedures to include knowledge transfer about the politics of race, class, and gender, reflecting how German-Jewish refugees studied and situated themselves within these categories.

This article offers the first comprehensive history of Anglo-American married couples who co-published together, c. 1870–1939. It departs from the tendency to solely focus on the detrimental impact of marriage on women’s professional lives and the framing of middle-class women as simply either marrying or working as ‘spinsters’ before the Great War. It instead centres couples who together carved out enviable new positions, arguing these endeavours should be recognized as a growing socio-cultural phenomenon of this era. Moreover, it unpacks the significance of the prominent public discourse circulated to readers across the English-speaking world about such relationships. The most ‘popular’ partnerships were celebrated as simultaneously ‘exceptional’ collaborators and ‘ordinary’ married couples. Their dual-working lifestyles and intellectual compatibility was held up as holding the key to unlocking greater marital happiness. However, invested in carving out their roles in a deeply hierarchical, capitalist world, ‘popular’ couples often remade and propagated regressive ideas about gender, class, and racialized difference. Still, the article contends that the paradoxes in this discourse facilitated the creation of an imaginative space where readers could explore and self-actualize new perspectives about the ways they, and those around them, might partake in work cultures and intimate relationships in twentieth-century society.

In 1974, the International Species Information System (ISIS) was launched as a computerised database for zoo animals. Developed by a small group in Minneapolis, ISIS is now used by over 1,300 zoos on five continents and recognised as a crucial tool for ex situ conservation. The founders aimed to transform long-standing global patterns of zoo animal management. Rather than places where wild-caught animals went to die, they envisioned zoos as interconnected hubs supporting the global breeding and survival of endangered species. This article examines how the ‘infrastructural globalism’ of ISIS took shape. At first sight, the system appears to be a universal instrument for collecting neutral data. Yet, using the lens of ‘infrastructural inversion’ and examining the legal, socio-political, and scientific contexts in which it was developed, the article highlights how locally rooted ambitions and global competitions shaped its design and operation. Despite its aura of global reach, the effectiveness of ISIS relied on continuous local human effort, which explains its limitations. On a broader level, the history of ISIS reminds us that the influence of infrastructural globalism extends to non-human animals, and the ways they move around the world.

The study of the history of science is widely understood to be undergoing a profound and much-needed transformation, from a subject focused on Europe to one encompassing the entire world. Yet the aims of the field have always been global. During the decades after the Second World War the inevitable progress of Western science was seen as the key to its role in world history. From the 1970s the rise of cultural history and laboratory ethnographies undermined this assumption. Indebted to colonial anthropology, these approaches revealed that the power of science was not inherent, but the result of local and contingent processes. Explanation needed to be symmetrical in analysing practices of all kinds wherever they were found, from economics and divination in West Africa to supernatural healing and particle physics in the American heartland. The geographical and conceptual broadening of the field is thus a long-delayed outcome of developments extending back many decades. It also means that references to the ‘global’ in history of science – even more than elsewhere in the humanities – continue to resonate with the universalizing aims of the natural and social sciences.

The standard of living is a conceptual object of great concern to governments, social scientists, and the public. How people lived in the past is likewise of much interest to historians. There is wide (if not universal) agreement that a higher standard of living is preferable to a lower one. Congruence ends there, however, as what constitutes the appropriate measure of people’s well-being is subject to a wide range of parallel, overlapping, and sometimes even conflicting opinions. How to collect the evidence necessary to calculate whatever measure we settle on, from both the contemporary world and the historical record, is equally contested. Indeed, in the case of efforts to measure well-being in the past, the evidence we might want may not exist at all. The question is too important though to settle for narrow and often misleading metrics that capture material wealth alone. Measures of our lifespan, the expansion of our mental capabilities, and our ability to feel secure and to participate in our collective governance make essential contributions. Finally, we need measures that are sensitive to the requirements for shared human sociability in different historical contexts. The insights of historians and other observers of human societies will be essential to complement the theorizing of social scientists.

The Progressive Era was characterized by debates about the future of the United States and the role of individuals, households, and organizations in shaping that future. These debates included those about domestic work, sometimes specifically referred to as the “servant question” or the “servant problem.” This discourse considered not only paid household labor, but also the nature of race, gender, and American life after slavery. This article reviews the servant question in Washington, D.C., and reveals how commentators engaged with modernity and nostalgia to understand the contradiction between their sense of white and African American women’s failures and their belief that both groups of women belonged in white households. The servant question is key cultural context for a 1917 “favorite servant contest.” The second half of the article examines the clubwomen who organized the contest and the experiences of an elderly, formerly enslaved woman named Theresa Harper. The organizers responded to the D.C. servant question with an effort to carry racial hierarchies into the twentieth century, a vision of the future of household labor very different from that of Black domestic workers.

This article challenges the narratives that we tell ourselves about women’s history in the nineteenth century, particularly narratives that celebrate progress in the legal status of women, based on the acquisition of rights. As it shows, legal changes in the nineteenth century lumped all women into an artificially reductive category “women,” separated them from their families’ property, and turned those claims into something so problematic that they were linked to fraud. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was difficult to imagine that family property to which women contributed all their lives might actually belong to them. The article focuses on white women of considerable means. But the point is that the problematic legal category “women” not only compromised all women’s legal claims to property, but also obscured other, important social and legal differences—including those of race and class—among them.

What does it mean to write the history of science and the ‘big picture’? In this introduction, I argue that ‘scale’ is a crucial but relatively underutilized concept for addressing this question. Rather than taking ‘big’ as a transparent category, I develop a detailed theoretical account of scale in the history and historiography of science. Following work in political geography, I argue that there is a ‘politics of scale’, one that the sciences have played a key role in shaping. Following work in the philosophy of history, I argue that scale should be thought of in its temporal dimension as well as its more traditional spatial dimension. And following work in cultural anthropology, I argue that scale should be understood as an actor's category just as much as an analytic category. The sciences, it turns out, have been one of the principal means through which scale is made and contested. More broadly, this volume of BJHS Themes encourages a creative and open-ended approach to scale in the history of science.

The history of science in public discussion is dominated by large-scale narratives of revolution. These locate epistemic violence within specialist communities, obscuring the role of science in environmental destruction and in silencing other ways of engaging with the world. At the same time, the language of revolution has fostered an unrealistic image of science, giving too much prominence to crisis, heroic challenges to authority and the wholescale abandonment of established theory. Revolutionary narratives in history of science were consolidated in the decades around 1900, as the genealogy for an emerging union of science, industry and imperial power. Even when explicitly rejected, they function as ‘ghost narratives’ within teaching and research. Relocating epistemic violence not only involves changing the geography and chronology of established narratives, a project that is well under way. It also requires understanding that revolution is the wrong category of event for communicating science and its history.

This article argues that recent global histories of Europe represent just one quite specific mode of global awareness in a long history of European global historical and social scientific consciousness. There is no doubt that our understanding of the European past would be more than ill-served by misplaced isolationism or the simple rejection of the massive scientific gains made by global history. Yet recent shifts in the structures, technologies, and modes of the globalization inherited from the post-Cold War world push us to reconsider how that global interconnectedness was achieved. European history after our most recent “global turn” must take into account previous modes of global consciousness and examine how globalization itself has been shaped by this knowledge. Indeed, past understanding of global interconnectedness did not necessarily lead to more open borders, increased interdependency, or growing cultural fluidity. Dis-integrating and downscaling modes of social organization were invented and reinvigorated in response to perceived global forces. There were also conscious attempts to channel the fruits and accumulations of global processes based on an awareness of their potentially enriching and destabilizing impact. These efforts to take control of globalization did not stop it, but they did give it a specific shape in particular moments. As a case in point, the article argues that the half-century following the French Revolution witnessed what might be called a deglobalizing globalization: a moment when the global integration that many considered responsible for the upheaval of the Revolution certainly did not stop, but was redirected in the service of a sovereign nation through the birth of new modes of social science and history writing.

This contribution seeks to evaluate the influence of the “global turn” on medieval studies, with an accent on the European Middle Ages. Developing global perspectives for the premodern period constitutes a real challenge. First, the very notion of the “Middle Ages” is a Eurocentric concept and its application in non-European contexts can be criticized. Second, while the observation of far-ranging contacts and networks of exchange has opened important avenues for research in premodern history, the quantitative significance of those contacts remains difficult to evaluate. Third, there is an ongoing tension between different visions of (medieval) history’s function in society. Despite these problems, recent contributions to the “global Middle Ages” have opened up new approaches to phenomena that are equally pertinent for European medieval studies. While the global turn might not entirely reshape the history of medieval Europe, it certainly adds important layers and new perspectives to subjects that not only resonate with contemporary interests but have long been a concern of European medieval history, such as migration, commerce, and religion. In spite of the difficulties and challenges (methodological, linguistic, etc.) that it poses, the global turn has the potential to contribute to the development of new thematic approaches and new forms of cooperation in the field of medieval studies.