This text draws attention to former ideologies of the scientific hero in order to explore the leading features of Charles Darwin's fame, both during his lifetime and beyond. Emphasis is laid on the material record of celebrity, including popular mementoes, statues and visual images. Darwin's funeral in Westminster Abbey and the main commemorations and centenary celebrations, as well as the opening of Down House as a museum in 1929, are discussed and the changing agendas behind each event outlined. It is proposed that common-place assumptions about Darwin's commitment to evidence, his impartiality and hard work contributed substantially to his rise to celebrity in the emerging domain of professional science in Britain.

The science historian Charles Singer might seem to have shared with positivists a widely held commitment to observation as the foundation of knowledge. Yet in fact Singer's historiography was peculiarly unconcerned with instruments, models and other artefacts. Such tools might have been expected to present crucial empirical evidence for the historical arguments and ideal material for the didactics which pioneers such as Singer associated with their mission of a ‘scientific humanism’. In their hands, physical things did not translate into epistemic things. This was deliberate. Yet while the configuration of science history which would distance it from material objects seems to speak of a shift from the visual to texts, the ocular technologies deployed in Singer's histories rather point to a co-existence of different kinds of visuality in that period's scholarship. As the academic and the museological aspects of science history pulled apart, the visuality of the museum came to be complemented by texts that vitally relied on images. The function of such images was to create proximity with the cognitive desires around whose traffic these histories became paper theatres of knowing. In bypassing material theatres and crafting realities that he understood to be empirically undemonstrable, Singer purposefully developed a non-authoritarian approach to the legacy of the scientific enterprise. He presented the story of understanding nature not as entailing obedience to its established results, but instead as embodying an attitude of continuing enquiry.

Historians of science have often presented the inter-war period as a time when British scientific communities radically questioned existing scholarship on ‘race’. The ascendancy of genetics, and the perceived need to challenge Nazi ‘racial’ theory have been highlighted as pivotal issues in shaping this British revision of ‘racial’ ideas. This article offers a detailed analysis of British scientific thinking in the inter-war period. It questions whether historians have exaggerated or oversimplified the prevalence of anti-‘racial’ reform. It uses a wide range of scientific writings to consider issues of continuity and change in ‘racial’ thinking in mainstream British scientific communities. The article probes the relationship between science and politics, focusing on the extent to which ideological factors affected both the scientific agenda and conclusions as regards ‘racial’ issues. Far from dismissing the idea that events in the inter-war period triggered changes in the way in which British scientists dealt with ‘race’, the article argues that the seeds of the post-Second World War international scientific rejection of ‘race’ were sown in inter-war Britain amid considerable ambivalence and discord.

We must remember that the investigator, whether a biologist, an economist, or a sociologist, is himself a part of history, and that if he ever forgets he is a part of history he will deceive his audience and deceive himself.J. B. S. Haldane, Heredity and Politics, 1938

In the mid-1940s, Argentina was partially isolated and ruled by a military regime. The political confrontation between the military and the scientific community as well as international pressures played a major role in the failure of the first attempts to cope with nuclear development. Only after the relationship between the military and local scientists was readjusted and control of atomic energy was placed in the hands of the Navy, and Argentina's international relations restored, did nuclear development begin to take off. This paper examines the traumatic process of creating the political and institutional conditions for the reception of nuclear technology in a peripheral context. The key to shaping future policies was the decision made by Argentina's Atomic Energy Commission in April 1957 to construct its first research nuclear reactor instead of buying it as other countries such as Spain and Brazil were doing at the time.

Whereas historiography of the debates on “early man in America” isolates Florentino Ameghino's ideas on human evolution from his paleontological and geological work, this paper presents Ameghino's ideas on human ancestors in regard to the controversies over the origin and dispersion of mammals. Therefore, this paper analyzes the constitution of paleontology in Argentina at the end of nineteenth century by describing, firstly, the Ameghino brothers' organization of research. By tackling this aspect I want also to discuss the place of science in late nineteenth-century Argentina. Secondly, I will sketch “Ameghino's ideas” about Patagonia as a center of distribution of mammals, the age of Patagonian strata, and the South American origin of humankind. The Ameghino brothers' logistics of fieldwork created not only the means for finding a remarkable fossil fauna but also a trap that undermined their scientific credibility. Therefore, I will focus on the problem of fieldwork in “distant” places and of scientific wandering in Patagonia. In the polemics presented here, language, transportation systems, visual representations, and technical devices were crucial elements for the creation of paleontological objects.

This paper argues that eighteenth-century Portuguese scientific policies promoted the inclusion of its main colony, Brazil, in the Enlightenment environment. This was accomplished by innovative initiatives, such as voyages to explore the colonial territory. Natural history activities, especially in mining, remained at the center of this political project and relied on co-opting groups of Portuguese in America. Based on the life of João da Silva Feijó, this article outlines the relevant connections between Feijó's scientific activities and the first Brazilian national expedition in the 1850s, which led to discussion about developing the Brazilian nation. This analysis is aimed toward the growing consensus in historiography of the sciences that scientific activities practiced outside European centers gave rise to complex interactions involving the processes of mondialization of sciences and the construction of a local scientific context.

The contemplation of the heavenly vault suggests to any generalizing intelligence the idea of the world suspended within this concavity. During rude barbaric times such as the High Middle Ages – the records of which are precious in this respect – it was thought that this vault rested on the surface of the Earth like a glass bell. And when experience gained firstly by terrestrial travels and afterwards by circumnavigation showed that this was a delusory phenomenon and, at the same time, that the Earth was an autonomous sphere floating within space, the [heavenly] vault became in turn a hollow and translucent sphere containing the concentric world, like the white of an egg surrounding the yolk. Cosmological experience then revealed that the stars were situated at different heights in the supposed vault, which compelled imagining new concentric spheres. Finally, it was discovered that there are neither such spheres nor such a vault; that the amplification and multiplicity of the latter were illusions – as was the concave aspect of the sky – and that the space enclosing the universe is an abyss.

Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), by the engineer Euclides da Cunha, is one of the most important books in Brazilian literature, with more than 50 local editions and translations in at least nine languages. Published in 1902 after four years of writing, it is a book about nationality in Brazil that sparked a debate regarding the subject of national consciousness and the connection between a nation's physical landscape, its people, and its culture. The book draws from a wide spectrum of knowledge that synthesizes science and art as the pinnacle of human thought. Cunha was a man of great culture and learning and in this work his professional activities and scientific writings merge to celebrate Brazilian culture in different realms of knowledge. The author worked as an engineer and had connections with the scientific community and the world of natural science. His explicit references to naturalists, travelers, geologists, and botanists reflect the historical moment of scientific knowledge in Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and no less than that, Cunha's personal connections with the local scientific community.

This issue of Science in Context presents a collection of historical studies on various aspects of science and its practice as developed in Latin-American contexts. Relatively few scholars working in the history of science, and even in the more general field of “science studies,” have devoted their research to this field. Likewise, relatively little research has been done by scholars of Latin American studies on the cultural, political, and social impact of science, a field that is usually considered to be one of the central, defining aspects of modern, Western civilization.

Between February of 1797 and July of 1798, Francisco Barrera y Domingo, a Spanish surgeon, wrote an extensive treatise on slave medicine in the Caribbean. Entitled Reflexiones Historico Fisico Naturales Medico Quirurgicas, this 894-page manuscript accounts for eighteen years of its author's professional practice in the region. It provides a clear picture of daily life in the sugar plantations as seen through the eyes of a modest surgeon, thus presenting us with an opportunity to explore the ideological and intellectual universe of this “invisible” category of colonial practitioners. Despite its importance, Barrera's Reflexiones remains almost unknown. Only a handful of scholars have even acknowledged the existence of the volume and no systematic analysis of its content is available in English.

As in other countries, the public in Argentina became aware of the existence of something called “the theory of relativity” only after November 1919. Although the news of Arthur Eddington's eclipse expedition, which provided the first confirmation of Einstein's theory, was poorly reported in the newspapers, by the end of 1920 Einstein had become a household name for the educated middle class of Buenos Aires, the capital city of the country. This was in great measure the result of the activity of a few enthusiastic lecturers. Significantly, none of them belonged to the prestigious Institute of Physics of the University of La Plata, which during the decade of the 1910s was considered the most important center of physical research in Latin America. Between July and August 1920 the Spanish physicist Blas Cabrera – perhaps the greatest popularizer of Einstein's theory in Spain – visited Argentina and talked about relativity. In September Georges Duclout, a French engineer who had graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic and by then was professor of applied mechanics at the School of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences (FCEFyN) of the University of Buenos Aires, also gave a series of conferences on the subject. That same month José Ubach, a Jesuit astronomer trained at the Ebro Observatory in Spain, and established in Buenos Aires, lectured on relativity at the Colegio del Salvador.