Mapping River Radiation: Ruth Patrick's Savannah River Diatometers, 1950-1960

Lloyd Ackert

Drexel University

In the 1950s, Ruth Patrick (1907-2013) organized a long term project to study the impact of Savannah River Nuclear Power Plant on the river's biodiversity. This poster will map the variety of boundaries that she crossed in this research: Institutionally, her study intersected the Atomic Energy Commission, DuPont, and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Intellectually, she deployed limnology and botany in a novel ecological and environmentalist practice. This highlighted the 'Patrick Principle,' the idea she developed in the 1940s that correlated a river's biodiversity with the health of its ecosystem, especially in regards to human impact. In practice, she developed simple, yet elegant devices, diatometers, to measure the species content of microbes living in the Savannah River. And personally, she represents a high-profile and early example of crossing the gender barrier in mid-20th century science.

Based on the statistical/informational graphic mapping methods developed Charle-Joseph Minard in the 1850s and re-envisioned by Michael Friendly (http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/re-minard.php) this poster will simultaneously depict the geographic placement of Patrick's diatometers, schedule of observations, and the institutional and intellectual relationships in their historical context.

The Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project

Bethany Anderson et al.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Cybernetics emerged during World War II as the science of communication and control systems used to build automatic antiaircraft systems, but gradually became a vehicle through which scientists, engineers, humanists, and social scientists studied the complexities of communication and self-organizing systems. Generally regarded as one of the most influential scientific movements of the 20th century, cybernetics emerged at a time when postwar science had become highly compartmentalized, epitomizing the interdisciplinarity that has become emblematic of innovative research in the modern era.

This poster will describe “The Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project,” a collaborative effort among four institutions that maintain archival records vital to the exploration of cybernetic history--the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the American Philosophical Society, the British Library, and MIT. With grant funding from the NEH, the team is developing a prototype web-portal and analysis-engine to provide access to archival material related to the development of the field of cybernetics, using computational methods such as natural language processing. In addition to supporting the development of a web-portal and analysis-engine, the NEH award has enabled the multi-institutional team to begin digitizing some of the archival records related to the pioneering work of U of I Electrical Engineering professors Heinz von Foerster and W. Ross Ashby, neurophysiologist Warren S. McCulloch, and mathematician Norbert Wiener. This poster will discuss the project's challenges, goals, and outcomes to date.

The Physician's Album Amicorum: Travel and Transfer of Medical Knowledge

Maria Avxentevskaya

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

The model of "ars apodemica" formalized in Bartholin’s "De peregrinatione medica" (1674) presumed: “Today the whole of Europe is on the move,” and “no one puts faith in the authority of a physician who has not set foot outside his native land.” Travel became a form of collective initiation for physicians collecting skills and observations.

My project explores the manuscript genre of alba amicorum – “travelling friendship albums” – kept by medical students and physicians during their academic peregrinations. By the mid-seventeenth century, such albums evolved into richly illustrated collections of notes, and now offer evidence of the artisanal humanism and ingenuity of medical discourse.

Humanist networking as part of “ars apodemica” and “ars memoria” fostered the occupational integrity of medical practices. My study ascertains the strategies of travel choices and note-taking during formative years in the careers of aspiring physicians. For instance, the album of Johann Friedrich Weiss offers an illustrative example: in 1626–1633, Weiss travelled from Leipzig through Sedan to Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, London, the Netherlands, Altdorf and Padua, before finally settling as a town physician in Nuremberg. He met various luminaries: Jean Riolan, Daniel Heinsius, Galileo, and young Johann Lorenz Bausch, the future founder of the Leopoldina. Aphoristic and emblematic ways of presenting memorable meetings in the albums were part of medical pedagogy, where observations were habitually processed into typified historiae of cases. My project looks into the genre of "album amicorum" as a lens displaying challenges posed for the doctor’s hand making inscriptions, the mind making choices, and the memory maintaining the continuum of medical archives.

The Association of Scientists for Atomic Education: Creating a Curricular Network in the Early Cold War

Shawn Bullock

Simon Fraser University

This poster will be designed to supplement paper proposal (submission 1011, The Association of Scientists for Atomic Education and Public Education in the late-1940s: Uncovering the hidden curriculum). The short thesis of my poster will be that the Association of Scientists for Atomic Education (ASAE) developed a robust curricular network within a short 3-year time frame immediately following WW II, and that this network functioned allowed ASAE to function more as a political organization than an education organization. The ASAE's base of operations was New York City, although there were several regional offices that were often in competition with each other. The poster will use a backdrop map of the USA to highlight the particular curricular activities in each geographic region. Photos of curricular materials will be included, pending permission of an archive. The poster will entreat observers to consider the ways in which ASAE's goals of educating scientists, the adult public, and the high school and college population stimulating the formation of multiple, sometimes competing networks of curriculum initiatives within the continental United States during the early Cold War.

Illustrating a Future Nuclear War: How Illustrations in Herman Kahn’s The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence” Emphasized his Ideas

Anna Dvorak

Oregon State University

In the early 1960s, understanding the threat and creating a plan to follow in case of a nuclear attack was the US government’s main concern in combating the Soviets. Men such as Herman Kahn and others working for RAND were dedicated to assessing the risks and threats this potential war could incite, to varying degrees in different potential cases.

Kahn presented his ideas in a larger work entitled On Thermonuclear War and in shortened form as both an article and as a Senate Document entitled “The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence.” The article and Senate Document are nearly identical in scope, however, the excerpt is illustrated with captioned sketches that further emphasized Kahn’s straight forward, and optimistic, approach to discussion of the future in which nuclear war was possible. The captions also served to underscore what Kahn believed to be most important in discussion of future war and the ability of the Soviets. For example, one illustration is captioned “Might it be possible for youthful survivors of a thermonuclear attack to tell the story to their grandchildren? Almost surely, the answer is yes.” Similar to illustrations in other documents of the era, these are simple statements and claims Kahn made throughout his larger discussion of his ideas, but chose to isolate and emphasize in the margin along side his text. These illustrations also highlighted key issues of the era such as Sputnik I, Berlin, and North and South Korea.

Promoting Women in Science: Educating through the Archives

Amy Fisher

University of Puget Sound

Recent science-education research suggests that one of the most effective ways to promote women’s interest and retention in science is to engage students in conversations about the contributions and underrepresentation of women in science. This poster presentation showcases how historians of science working in conjunction with library staff can develop engaging activities that examine the history of women’s experiences in science at their universities, promoting conversations about women in science. More specifically, this poster highlights how our undergraduate students reconstruct early-twentieth-century women’s experiences in and contributions to science using materials from our institution’s archives, including classroom photographs, grade books, yearbooks, and newspaper articles. This popular ‘discovery’ activity may be easily adapted to other institutional settings and encourages conversations about the ways in which gender stereotypes can affect who studies science.

The Johannes Harder Herbarium: Combining Specimen and Illustration

Maura Flannery

St. John's University, NY

At the Oak Spring Library, there is a manuscript, Historia stirpium, created by the German apothecary Johannes Harder in about 1595. This is a bound volume of pressed plants, each labeled with its Latin and German names. Harder’s father, Hieronymous, also an apothecary, had created a number of such collections, called herbaria. The idea of pressing plants and using them as reference material had developed before 1550, probably in Italy. The first documented herbarium was attributed to Luca Ghini of Bologna, founder of the first botanical garden in Pisa. What makes the Harder herbaria different from most others is that missing parts on many specimens are filled in with body color. In this poster, I will present several examples of this treatment from the 1595 manuscript and provide an analysis of what these artistic additions suggest about the state of knowledge of plants and why visual documentation was so important. I will use as guides several recent studies on the importance of art in both documenting, and even more, creating scientific knowledge. These include Omar Nasim’s analysis of John Herschel’s study of nebulae, Barbara Wittmann’s on animal taxonomy, and most notably, Florike Egmond’s on collections of early modern naturalia drawings. She argues that by focusing on the details in these art works, historians can learn about the thought processes that led to particular forms of depiction. Harder’s collection of 588 dried plant specimens, most with watercolor additions, lends itself to such an analysis.

George Stokes and the Royal Society’s editorial and refereeing processes, 1853-1885: the data

Aileen Fyfe

University of St Andrews

Pierpaolo Dondio

Dublin Institute of Technology

This poster will facilitate more widespread discussion with the results presented in our 'contributed paper'.

The Royal Society of London was one of the learned societies which incorporated refereeing into the editorial practices of its journal publication during the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, the use of confidential, written referee reports for some papers was well-established for the Philosophical Transactions. But which papers were sent to referees? How many referees? And who were the most influential decision-makers? Previous scholars have examined the history of individual papers published (or not) by the Society. In this paper, we attempt to sketch out the bigger picture, and to look beyond the formal guidelines (as previously examined by one of us), at the actual editorial practice. From 1853, the secretaries of the Royal Society of London maintained a ‘Register of Papers’, recording the fate of every paper read to the Society, including referee names, dates and final decisions. We have been analysing this data computationally, with a focus on the period of secretary-ship of the physicist George Stokes. We will present a social network analysis of the people who were active in Royal Society publishing, as authors, referees and ‘communicators’; consider what we can learn from the statistical patterns in the data; and reveal some intriguing differences of practice between the biological and physical sciences.

The signification of specialist botanical gardens founded in the 19th century, the example of the agricultural botanical garden created in 1890 in Krakow

Izabela Krzeptowska-Moszkowicz & Lukasz Moszkowicz

Institute of Landscape Architecture, Cracow University of Technology

In the 19th century, educational and scientific activities in the field of natural sciences became exposed to new areas of knowledge. The development of new branches of botany, e.g. plant physiology, induced the further development of other related sciences, including agricultural science. University studies of agriculture were opened and specialist botanical gardens were founded at the same time; all this brought about the development of agriculture with a scientific base.

The Agricultural Studies at Jagiellonian University was created in 1890 by two Polish botanists – Edward Janczewski (1846-1918) (an excellent plant anatomist, taxonomist, the pioneer of genetics), and Emil Godlewski (1847-1930) (the pioneer of plant physiology). Simultaneously, there was a specialist agricultural botanical garden founded by Janczewski. This garden with specially selected collections of plants played a significant role as an educational tool. Tables, herbaria (some prepared by the lecturers themselves) and, more importantly, live specimens were presented during classes. In the present day, technical developments have enabled the substitution of real specimens with alternative representations.

Small, specialist botanical gardens were not only used for educational purposes, they also helped to develop new fields of scientific knowledge. Such gardens could have had a significant influence on the general development of knowledge. The collection of currants and gooseberries (genus Ribes) – gathered by Janczewski in the agricultural botanical garden and later moved to the older Botanical Garden of Jagiellonian University founded in 1783 – was the biggest and the most complete collection in the entire world; it was the basis for the creation of monography that remains respected to this day.

The Grid Adapts: Translating Territory in the Lower Mississippi Valley 1803-1845

Julia Lewandoski

University of California, Berkeley

After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the United States struggled with the massive task of taking possession of the former French and Spanish colony of Louisiana. Central to the work of imperial transition was converting landholdings from French and Spanish idioms into the visual language of the United States Public Lands Survey System (PLSS). Yet translating land tenure from one empire to the next entailed much more than changing units from arpents into acres.

This poster displays the efforts of U.S. land surveyors in early nineteenth century Louisiana, as they struggled to locate land records, negotiated with uncooperative landowners, and extensively adapted the rigid grid of the PLSS to accommodate existing cadastral patterns. In particular, it reveals that because of the intimate links between land tenure and land measurement, U.S. surveyors had to alter the process by which they measured properties. Instead of following linear PLSS meridians, they found that the only workable way to establish existing boundaries was by meandering Louisiana’s bayous as their French predecessors had done.

Land surveying is often held up as a quintessential technology of modern state mastery over territory, one that abstracts and obscures local particularity. Yet in Louisiana, it was improvisational, locally accommodating, and bound by the legacy of prior empires. The new maps that U.S. land surveyors made reflect—visually and technically—the distinctively local imperial legacies of the Lower Mississippi Valley.

Diagnosing Demons: Witchcraft, Demonic Possession, and Melancholia in Early Modern Western Europe

Sarah Lewin

Mississippi State University

When misfortune struct early modern European communities, people looked toward supernatural explanations for their plights. Frequently, a person acting against the norms of a community became the subject of scrutiny for disrupting the natural world. Demonic possession diagnosis occurred if an individual displayed a certain criteria of abnormal behavior: cognizance of foreign languages, unnatural display of strength, aversion to holy objects, strange fits or paralysis or seizures, and so on. Such expansive criteria made it difficult to fake and even more difficult to cure. Furthermore, it was often seen as a test to one’s faith, the power of God, and also the power of the Devil. This test of faith struck women in a much higher proportion to men. Significantly like witchcraft and melancholia, demonic possession was a primarily female ailment. The relationship of possession with melancholia and witchcraft is an important segue as the three phenomena occurred in the at the same time, same geographic locations, and afflicted the same victims. Likewise, the “symptoms” of the three presented in a similar fashion, with women acting out in bizarre, uncharacteristic behavior. Melancholia was a disease mostly associated with women during the early modern period. The symptoms also mimicked demonic possession or even witchcraft. What were the differences between demonic possession, witchcraft, and melancholia? How did one distinguish the three? This research proposal seeks to address these neglected questions by studying demonic possession in relation to witchcraft and melancholia in early modern Europe. This undertaking would allow historians to better understand early modern conceptions of medicine, culture, religion, and gender.

Images of Science in American Film

Gregory Macklem

University of Notre Dame

Erik Peterson

University of Alabama

Despite their escapist packaging, movies are rarely message-neutral. Through subtle (and not-so-subtle) devices, films reflect back ideas we already hold and ideas that we might be unable or unwilling to discuss in other contexts.

Since the earliest days of film, movies have wrestled with impacts of science and technology on various aspects of life. Given the dramatic potential, we shouldn't be surprised that many have focused on the perceived challenges and even dangers of science. From Modern Times to The Matrix, movies have reflected contemporary concerns and beliefs about science and technology. As science and technology and their roles in society have evolved over time, so have their cinematic images.

We will argue that, in addition to reflecting specific contemporary issues (e.g., race, fascism and freedom, the Cold War, science and business), science and technology themselves have come to be seen, theatrically, as inherent threats in themselves. Instead of the deleterious effects of the abuse of new technologies or the failure of safeguards, the potential of technoscience and its products to be untameable and intrinsically dangerous emerges in later 20th century films.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Map Usage in the Site Selection of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Large-Scale Interferometers

Tiffany Nichols

Harvard University

This paper explores the use of maps in identifying sites for placement of large-scale interferometers by LIGO and affiliated researchers involved in the site selection process which has been overlooked in research directed to the history of gravitational wave detection. Specifically, I seek to show the content portrayed in maps led to placement of the interferometers in unexpectedly noisy areas. Although the topographic maps provided the information to determine the flatness of the land, a highly sought after quality for the sites, these maps did not provide sufficient information concerning localized disturbances that would affect the ability of the interferometers to detect gravitational waves. These decisions necessitated engineering solutions that would stabilize the interferometer to avoid masking gravitational waves which deform the spacetime fabric on the order of 1 x 10^-22 characteristic strain. Surprisingly, due to the unexpectedly noisy sites, the engineered solutions allowed for increases of sensitivity in the magnitude range of 1 x 10^-22 characteristic strain, which resulted in the detection event on September 14, 2015.

The Transformation of the Encyclopedic Museum: Tiberius C. Winkler, Teyler’s new wing, continuity and change

Ilja Nieuwland

Huygens ING, Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences

When Tiberius Cornelis (or “Tjibbe”) Winkler, Teyler’s custodian of mineralogy and palaeontology, passed away in July of 1897, he took the museum’s century-long tradition of long-lasting gentleman scientists with him. Yet to regard Winkler as an encyclopaedic scholar in the same sense as his predecessors Van Marum and would be a mistake. Although largely self-taught in matters of natural history, geology, and palaeontology, Winkler could fall back on a solid if mainly practical medical education.

During the early half of the nineteenth century a prolific acquisition policy had not been followed up with similarly thorough registration and conservation practices. Fresh into the position of curator of the cabinet for paleontology and mineralogy in 1864, Winkler immediately set to work ordening the collections. However, it soon became clear that the museum’s amibitions required much more floorspace than was available.

The history of the three-room (plus portal, lecture theatre and library) 1885 extension shows a desire to continue the encyclopedic ideal that lay at the foundation of the museum a century before, and certainly differed from similar contemporary initiatives in Europe that were constructed on a developmental framework. At first sight, the extension was just that: a continuation of the 18th century Oval Room. Closer inspection, however, reveals a number of other mechanisms at work that turned the new rooms into something much more contemporary. In my contribution, I shall attempt to identify those elements, in order to show the space’s transitional character.

On the Logic of Labor: EDSAC and the History of Open-Source Software (OSS)

Jonathan Penn

University of Cambridge

From 1946-58, the University of Cambridge sponsored the construction of EDSAC, the world’s first practical stored-program digital computer. Due to a combination of financial, spatial and administrative constraints imposed by the university, EDSAC’s chief architect, Maurice Wilkes, made the relatively novel decision, when compared to competing computer projects, to invite staff, students and outside collaborators to operate EDSAC in exchange for the sub-routines—an early form of programming code—they generated. The creation of a centralized library of sub-routines made Wilkes' system self-refining, since shortcuts and errors could then be identified collaboratively. This policy gave Cambridge an unanticipated advantage in midcentury computing: free error-checking. While other institutions struggled to address coding errors, Wilkes’ team benefit from a low-cost, bottom-up solution. I argue that Wilkes' approach, immortalized in 1951’s The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, the first-ever guidebook on programming, bridges EDSAC to the history of open-source software (OSS), whose roots have otherwise been traced back only to the mid-1950s in America.

America's Thirty-Billion Dollar Swindle: Science Denial and the Apollo IX Moon Landing

Lois Rosson

University of California, Berkeley

When Bill Kaysing published We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty-Billion Dollar Swindle in 1975, he did so at a time when claims about government corruption were uniquely legible; in the post-Watergate climate of the mid-1970’s, political paranoia didn’t appear nearly as unfounded as in the decade prior. Claims about CIA misconduct abroad and government cover-ups at home were corroborated at an alarming rate, reducing public trust in legislative bodies to a historic low.

While it’s tempting to dismiss Kaysing’s publication—one of the first instances of moon-landing denial to appear in print—as particulate in a larger deluge of conspiratorial literature, We Never Went to the Moon laid the foundation for one of the most enduring conspiracy theories of the twentieth-century. Early moon-landing denial framed the Apollo mission primarily as an act of government corruption, and can be more accurately characterized as “anti-establishment” than “anti-science.” NASA represented the state, and the state was understood as untrustworthy; moon-landing denial gave its proponents an alternative epistemological framework with which to undermine the authority of both institutions and the experts that represented them; deniers didn’t need to prove that the science was bad, just that the institution that produced it couldn’t be trusted.

The value in historicizing moon-landing denial as a concept with its own checkered intellectual genealogy is two-fold: it sheds light on the cultural contingencies of scientific authority in public discourse, and offers a unique window into the problem of mediating scientific information for large audiences.

The Power of Transmission: Pedigrees as Scientific Tools and Cultural Artifacts

Amir Teicher

Tel Aviv University

In the early twentieth century, eugenicists in both Germany and the US made extensive usage of the visual medium to propagate their ideas. Establishing the causal relations between genes and their actual impact on human beings relied heavily on one type of diagram: the pedigree. For the scholars who charted them, the pedigrees’ primary goal was to serve as means for arranging and retrieving medical data and as tools for facilitating scientific reasoning. For those who viewed them, they were the most palpable demonstration of the power of hereditary transmission to shape the fates of individuals, families and communities. Pedigrees therefore became a visual arena where the mechanism of heredity and its meaning were constantly negotiated. In my poster I will explore the construction of relations between scientific and social thought by scrutinizing pedigrees drawn by geneticists and eugenicists in Germany and in the US (1890-1940). I will identify the motivations that prompted individual scholars and entire scholarly communities to prefer one style of diagrammatic presentation over another and unravel the assumptions on the essence of heredity that underlay these methodological preferences. I will also track the lineage of specific pedigrees to highlight the alterations that they went through as they were copied from one scholar’s paper, through another’s textbook, to governmental publications propagating the need to implement eugenic policies. Finally, I will offer some reflections on the methodological peculiarities of analyzing pedigrees as historical artifacts.

Visual discourses of race in 18th and 19th century Mexico

Erica Torrens & Ana Barahona

National University of Mexico

This poster explores on the one hand, the genesis of scientific conceptions of race in Mexico and their accompanying impact on the racialization of bodies in eighteenth century and on the taxonomy of Homo sapiens in nineteenth century. Both enterprises, the racialization of bodies and the reconstruction of human ancestry produced, as one of their main epistemological results, several visual representations which circulated in both a local and a global framework. This circulation of novel representational modes strongly influenced debates on race and national identity formation, especially during the nineteenth century when the term “mestizo” powerfully appeared in the political discourse as a symbol of identity in the formation of the Mexican Nation State and as a homogenizing center of national identity.

Seeing the Forest for the Microbes: An Examination of Land Use Change and Emerging Epidemic Disease in Melbourne, Australia, 1837-1900

Emily Webster

University of Chicago

In 1865, William Thomson, a Fitzroy-based man of medicine, despaired over the mortality rate of tuberculosis in Melbourne, Australia. In studies of the area that ranged from 1865-1870, Thomson concluded, “Nearly 1 in 3 of the adult population of Melbourne, between the ages of 20 and 45 years and above 1 in 4 in the whole colony of Victoria, at the same ages, die of phthisis.” These death rates were a mystery to Thomson; why should a town in such a salubrious climatological zone and with a population only a fraction of the size of London contain an equally rampant disease rate – among the highest in the Western world? This poster will visualize a project intended to answer Thomson’s question. Drawing on recent public health scholarship, which suggests a firm link between land use change and emerging infectious diseases, epidemiological techniques, GIS, and historical records, I will analyze the city’s ability to handle waste, stagnant water, and other vectors of disease, and attempt to describe how manipulations of the landscape to accommodate the growing city’s sanitary and commercial needs exacerbated transmissibility of infectious diseases. This paper constitutes the beginning of a project that uses historically-applied scientific methodology to argue that the construction of the British colonial city fostered land use change uniquely suited to the perpetuation of some of the most prolific diseases of the modern era.

Mathematical Conversion: Christianity, Science, and the State in the 17th Century Jesuit Mission to China

Deborah Wood

University of California, Berkeley

Following a few small religious texts, like the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, Euclid’s Elements became in 1607 the first substantial book from the West to be translated into Chinese. This step, a joint effort between the Jesuit Father Matteo Ricci and the Christian convert Xu Guangqi, is sometimes taken to represent the start of the Jesuits’ “scientific apostolate” in China, a mission strategy that used European scientific knowledge as an evangelizing tool throughout the long seventeenth century. Often histories of the Jesuit mission characterize this choice as pragmatic: Having noticed the interest of individual literati, Ricci decided that, “European science appeared to be an appropriate vehicle to approach the Chinese upper class, and, implicitly, to introduce Christianity in China” (Golvers, 2003). Notably, summaries like this question neither what this suggests about the relationship between math and Christianity for Ricci nor whether his successors agreed. After looking at writings by Jesuit scientist-missionaries to explain their mission to European audiences, I suggest that in fact the ways scientist-missionaries conceptualized, or at least justified, the role of mathematics in their evangelization changed throughout the seventeenth century. At the start of the scientific apostolate Ricci considered mathematics logically related to the truths of the Catholic God and considered the Chinese capable of following that logic, but this Aquinian union slowly fractured in their depictions of the China mission as views about the Chinese people transformed and as the European state came to challenge the authority of the Church.

Albrecht Duerer and the Melancholy of the Heavens

Stefan Zieme

Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung, Humboldt University Berlin

In his famous Melencolia I from 1514 Albrecht Dürer prominently engraved a celestial scene resembling a cometary apparition. In the astral sciences of the Renaissance comets were distinguished phenomena that heralded specific earthly implications. Commonly their representations were rendered in an accessible iconography of the astronomical order. Dürer’s engraving complies with this model, yet it has not been noted before in art history. A real and specific apparition of a comet and its dreadful earthly aftereffects inspired Dürer in his artistic work. Melancholy emerges from a heavenly constellation and the complete failure of astrological prophecy being at odds with earthly events—reason had failed to cope with catastrophic times. This reading of Melencolia I from the viewpoint of the history of science and astronomy—as an allegory of a mental model of cometary lore and especially its failure—integrates all seemingly inconsistent details of the engraving and offers a completely novel layer to the long-standing art historical debate. Melencolia, thus, becomes a symbol of the epistemological significance of images.

Dominating Desert Frontiers: Mars, the American West and Democracy

Daniel Zizzamia

Harvard University

Mars and the western frontier share much in common in the American imagination. Frontier analogies have held a particularly special place in conceiving of an extraterrestrial future. Examples include NASA’s 1965 Railroads and the Space Program’s direct application of analogical reasoning and Mars colonization proselytizer Robert Zubrin’s invocation of Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1996 The Case for Mars. But this history goes back further into the science performed in the late nineteenth-century American West. USGS surveys spoke of the immense potential of the West and its capacity for dramatic climactic change. Astronomers even compared the technocratic vision of the Reclamation Service to the efforts of Martian engineers. Both the post-Civil War optimism of western settlement and NASA’s contemporary aspirations to terraform Mars reflect a fossil-fueled faith that science and technology can make humans masters of the natural world. They also reflect an overwhelming confidence that the material remains of geologic history can inform future climactic possibilities. In both of these optimistic visions, at center stage are discussions concerning techno-scientific control, democracy, climactic change, the significance of the deep past, and the importance of future frontiers. Looking deep into this history reveals the vital role of fossil fuels in conceiving of environmental mastery and sustaining ahistoric frontier mythologies and utopian aspirations. It also invites caution concerning the prominence of the techno-optimism in American thought that conceals the environmental and social consequences of dominating deserts.