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13581 results in History of science and technology

Page 24 of 680

Five Innovations That Changed Human History
  • Transitions and Impacts
  • Robin Derricourt
  • Published online:
    01 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • We live in an era of major technological developments, post-pandemic social adjustment, and dramatic climate change arising from human activity. Considering these phenomena within the long span of human history, we might ask: which innovations brought about truly significant and long-lasting transformations? Drawing on both historical sources and archaeological discoveries, Robin Derricourt explores the origins and earliest development of five major achievements in our deep history, and their impacts on multiple aspects of human lives. The topics presented are the taming and control of fire, the domestication of the horse,and its later association with the wheeled vehicle, the invention of writing in early civilisations, the creation of the printing press and the printed book, and the revolution of wireless communication with the harnessing of radio waves. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Derricourt's survey of key innovations makes us consider what we mean by long-term change, and how the modern world fits into the human story.

Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences
  • Troubling Encounters in the Americas and Pacific
  • Edited by Adam Warren, Julia E. Rodriguez, Stephen T. Casper
  • Published online:
    24 October 2024
    Print publication:
    07 November 2024
  • In this bold reconsideration of the human sciences, an interdisciplinary team employ an expanded theoretical and geographical critical lens centering the notion of the encounter. Drawing insights from Indigenous and Latin American Studies, nine case studies delve into the dynamics of encounters between researchers, intermediaries, and research subjects in imperial and colonial contexts across the Americas and Pacific. Essays explore ethical considerations and knowledge production practices that prevailed in field and expedition science, custodial institutions, and governance debates. They reevaluate how individuals and communities subjected to research projects embraced, critiqued, or subverted them. Often, research subjects expressed their own aspirations, asserted sovereignty or autonomy, and exercised forms of power through interactions or acts of refusal. This book signals the transformative potential of Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies for shaping future scholarship on the history of the human sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Managing Growth in Miniature
  • Solow's Model as an Artifact
  • Verena Halsmayer
  • Published online:
    24 October 2024
    Print publication:
    07 November 2024
  • Managing Growth in Miniature explores the history of the way economists think about growth. It focuses on the period between the 1930s and 1960s, tracing the development of the famed 'Solow growth model,' one of the central mathematical models in postwar economics. It argues that models are not simply 'efficient tools' providing answers to the problems of economic theory and governance. The Solow model's various uses and interpretations related not only to the ways it made things (in)visible, excluded questions, and suggested actions. Its 'success' and effects ultimately also pertained to its fundamental ambiguities. Attending to the concrete sides of economic abstractions, this book provides a richly layered and accessible account of the forms of knowledge that shaped the predominant notion of 'economic growth' and ideas of how to govern it.

  • Value, knowledge and reputation: zoological exchange by Australian museums, 1870–1900

  • Henry Reese, Vanessa Finney, Simon Ville
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 58 / Issue 1 / March 2025
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    18 October 2024, pp. 81-100
    Print publication:
    March 2025
    • Article
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  • The burgeoning nineteenth-century public-museum sector built a significant part of its natural-history specimen collections through extensive international trading. The early 2020s has seen an upsurge of scholarly interest in this largely overlooked trade. Exchange was a distinctive aspect of the natural-history trade that reveals much about the diverse practices and motives of the institutional collectors. Economic-geographic benefits included conserving the limited financial resources of museums and exploiting complementarities in the geographic distribution of specimens. Collection management, institutional reputation, social connection and international diplomacy were also part of a complex mix of value making that shaped this important international trade. We analyse the exchange practices of the three largest museums in the Australian colonies in the final three decades of the nineteenth century who exchanged Australia’s ‘rare and curious’ fauna with collectors across the globe. By deploying and analysing extensive, comparative data on a particular form of natural history, zoology, and a particular kind of trade, exchange trading, among three Australian museums, this paper extends and enriches recent scholarship on the mobility of natural-history specimens and how they were traded.

  • Conclusion: Historical Geographies of Future Weather

  • Simon Naylor, University of Glasgow
  • Book:
    The Observatory Experiment
    Published online:
    05 October 2024
    Print publication:
    10 October 2024, pp 235-246

  • Summary

    The Conclusion chapter reiterates the book’s approach, focus and main points. It reminds the reader that the book has concentrated on local, provincial, peripatetic and otherwise relatively marginal sites of scientific activity and shown how a wide variety of spaces were constituted and reconfigured as meteorological observatories. The conclusion reiterates the point that nineteenth-century meteorological observatories, and indeed the very idea of observatory meteorology, were under constant scrutiny. The conclusion interrogates four crucial conditions of these observatory experiments: the significance of geographical particularity in justifications of observatory operations; the sustainability of coordinated observatory networks at a distance; the ability to manage, manipulate and interpret large datasets; and the potential public value of meteorology as it was prosecuted in observatory settings. Finally, the chapter considers the use of historic weather data in recent attempts by climate scientists to reconstruct past climates and extreme weather events.

Page 24 of 680