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10293 results in History of science: general interest

Page 21 of 515

  • ‘The goddess that we serve’: projecting international community at the first serial chemistry conferences, 1893–1914

  • Geert Somsen
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 56 / Issue 4 / December 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    07 November 2023, pp. 453-467
    Print publication:
    December 2023
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  • The emergence of conferences in the late nineteenth century significantly changed the ways in which the international scientific community functioned and experienced itself. In the early modern Republic of Letters, savants mainly related through print and correspondence, and apart from at local and later national levels, scholars rarely met. International conferences, by contrast, brought scientists together regularly, in the flesh and in great numbers. Their previously imagined community now became tangible. This paper examines how conferencing reshaped the collective of international scientists by zooming in on the massive meetings of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry, 1893–1914. Drawing on Emile Durkheim's studies of religious gatherings it analyses the ritualization of routine conference practices, such as plenary ceremonies, toasts, ladies’ programmes and committee meetings. It looks at how roles were distributed as participants performed as hosts and guests, and in masculine and feminine and national and international identities. Importantly, it shows both how the sacralization of chemistry as a higher aim served to instil senses of dedication in order to organize labour and mitigate conflict, and how the self-perception of the international chemical community was based on contemporary understandings of parliament, democracy and representation.

  • Sex, science and curated community at the World League for Sexual Reform 1929 conference

  • Laura C. Forster
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 56 / Issue 4 / December 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    31 October 2023, pp. 469-484
    Print publication:
    December 2023
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  • This article interrogates the scientific conference as a means by which the organizers of the World League for Sexual Reform's 1929 conference attempted to marshal the ‘scientific spirit’ in order to present progressive sexual reform as a rational and scientifically informed undertaking. The conference was carefully curated to make the sex reform movement (and the assorted characters that gathered under its banner) look serious, legitimate and, most importantly, scientific. The conference was also an attempt by organizer Norman Haire to exert control over the strategy of sexology, an enterprise that put him at odds with other prominent sexologists of the time. Crucially, Haire understood sexology as inherently intellectually interdisciplinary, but was strategically convinced that the only sound rubric through which to promote and gain acceptance for the movement was through medical science. This central debate, about how best to define the contested concept of sexology, continues among historians today. By examining how the 1929 conference organizers wrestled to define their sex-reforming remit and how they curated the conference to that end, this paper will offer a window onto the mechanisms via which adherents of intellectual communities contend with heterogeneity, how we judge forms of knowledge and, ultimately, what constitutes science.

Page 21 of 515