How can historians of small spaces and cities focus on local events and issues and at the same time carry on conversations with peers in a disciplinar... [more]
Building on recent works that question a simplistic, White narrative of the history of academic oral history, this article focuses on the labors of Bl... [more]
This paper addresses the efforts of both Havelock. Ellis and Sigmund Freud to posit a theory of homosexuality, and especially considers their efforts to (re-)negotiate each other's theories. Its central premise derives from the sociology of scientific kn
The development of both the modern state and modern scientific discourses in the non-Western world are closely linked together, both being the outcome of the colonial encounter. Using a Foucauldian framework of power/knowledge and his notions of 'epistem
'The separation of theory and practice is not one that will easily be overcome by academic and philosophical critique, however necessary and important these are.' (Shanks and Tilley 1992, xxii) Here a team of archaeologists address this difficult theme,
This paper explores the history of a unique assemblage of researchers in the geodetic and allied sciences organised at Ohio State University (OSU) in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. From about 1950 to 1970, the OSU geodetic sciences group was the m
The article examines the role of the 13 dreams in the book of Genesis. The dreams are first shortly described (following Gnuse, 1984, and Oppenheim, 1956) in their historical context: the Near-East of over 3000 years ago. The structure of some of the drea
The encounter between the Christian Churches and Psychology has, for all its evident cultural importance, received little attention from disciplinary historians. During the period between the two world wars in Britain this encounter was particularly visib
We argue that broad, simple generalizations, not specifically linked to contingencies, will rarely approach truth in ecology and evolutionary biology. This is because most interesting phenomena have multiple, interacting causes. Instead of looking for sin
Many scholars emphasize the Soviet Union's invasion of Lithuania in 1940 as the first traumatic event in Marija Gimbutas' life, but she was exposed to conflict from the time of her birth. She was born in Vilnius, a city that was at the root of conflict
This essay, based on a chapter from a forthcoming study of the exploration of Central Africa, tells the story of the encounter between the German travelers Paul Pogge and Hermann Wissmann and a charismatic extatic cult or movement, the 'Children of Hemp.
Past sources of air pollution in the cities of Northern Italy are investigated by a critical analysis of a 17th-century treatise written by B.Ramazzini, a medical doctor interested in the associations between work, environmental pollution and health. In t
In his recent biography Richard Marius attends above all to Luther's temperament, which was melancholy and susceptible to haunting fears of death. As the biography breaks off in 1527, Luther is in deep depression and has already published works marred by
In the period 1875-1920, a debate about the generality and applicability of evolutionary theory to all organisms was motivated by work on unicellular ciliates like Paramecium because of their peculiar nuclear dualism and life cycles. The French cytologist
This study of 34 lawsuits between practitioners and patients shows how the law relating to contracts was brought to bear on conflicts over medical practice in eighteenth-century England. It shows that patients in this period had rights, and explores them
A vast range of sources, from chronicles, hagiography and the liturgy to medical manuscripts and charters, is at our disposal for the study of health and healing in Italy between the ninth and eleventh centuries. What is needed in order to exploit this ma
A meditation on Dutch by Edmund Morris, the controversial memoir-biography of Ronald Reagan, that uses some of the experimental techniques that appear in the book. The first part is the description of a scene, in screenplay form, in which I have a convers