“’Drawn from Life’: The Domestic Economies of Antebellum American Geological Illustrations”

AJ Blandford (Rutgers University)

During the first half of the nineteenth-century geologists developed a visual language to communicate scientific ideas about the earth through their use of maps, sections, diagrams and scenic views. The material shape and visual form of these images was determined and amended through an array of collaborative relationships: among the editors and transnational readers of scientific journals in global scientific communities; between husbands and wives drafting maps at the dinner table; and in the regional transactions between notebook sketchers, copperplate gravers and stone lithographers.

Historians of science have long been concerned with how networks of exchange shape scientific truths but many questions remain about the deliberative moments in which the material was made visual in order for geological knowledge to circulate. This paper explores the intimacies that produced geological imagery in the context of two different surveying relationships: the romantic marriage of Edward Hitchcock and Orra White, who described New England’s geology; and the professional divorce of Henry Darwin Rogers and J. Peter Lesley, who worked on the first Geological Survey of Pennsylvania. These antebellum geologists balanced scientific and aesthetic concerns with questions of cost and credit. Their abstractions of strata were grounded in realities of scientific reputation and domestic responsibility. I’ll contrast these two close partnerships to consider the role of gender in the professionalization of geological labor. As surveying work went from just putting names in print to putting food on the table who got credit for her work and who got paid more for his?

“Scientific Intimacy and Feminist Thought in Colonial British Bermuda”

Jenna Tonn (Harvard University)

Abstract coming.

“Transforming Conflict into Growth: Marriage and the Making of a Science of Intimate Relationships”

Teri Chettiar (University of Chicago)

Abstract coming.

“Personnel Business: Science, Self, and Secrets in the Mid-Century Corporation”

Whitney Laemmli (Columbia University)

Abstract coming.