Events for December 2008
December 2, 2008
David Caudill, Villanova University
“Lesson from the Arsenic Wars: The Image of the Mad Alchemist and the Crisis in Forensic Science”
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture | Visit site »
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
The history of arsenic detection in criminal courts includes numerous episodes of forensic scientists attacking other forensic scientists, implying that their testimony derived from hubris and amorality, both of which are characteristics associated with the image of the mad alchemist in popular culture. An arsenic-poisoning case in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, in the early 19th century, the arsenic wars in France and England leading up to the Marsh test, and the recently overturned conviction (for poisoning her husband with arsenic) of Cynthia Sommer in San Diego are in several respects strikingly similar “affairs.” While the current crisis in forensic science involves criticism of pre–DNA identification techniques and typically does not involve forensic chemistry, there is reason for some caution even today in arsenic-detection technologies.
David Caudill, J.D., Ph.D., is the Arthur M. Goldberg Family Chair in Law at Villanova University and a former Société de Chimie Industrielle fellow (2007–2008). His research and teaching interests include scientific expertise in the courtroom and in environmental regulation.
December 3, 2008
Jonathan Gilbride, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
“Gender, Politics and Policy”
Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Place: 2U Conference Room, Claire Fagin Hall, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
Jonathan Gilbride is a Doctoral Student in the School of Nursing at Penn. His paper discusses research carried out exploring how women have influenced American political debates and shaped policy over the 20th century and uses selected historical examples and relating them to late 20th century events
December 3, 2008
Ellery Foutch, University of Pennsylvania
“Titian Ramsay Peale’s Lepidoptera Projects and 19th-Century Entomology”
The American Entomological Society | Visit site »
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Place: Bird Hall, 3rd Floor, The Academy of Natural Sciences
Elery Foutch is a doctoral candidatein the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania and a Wyeth Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonia American Art Museum.
December 9, 2008
Kristie Macrakis, George Institute of Technology
“Ancient Imprints: The Origins of Invisible Ink in the Arts of War and Love”
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture | Visit site »
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Invisible ink originated in the ancient arts of love and war. Forged in a time of strife between the freedom-loving Greeks and the monarchic Persians, and sired in siege warfare, steganography (hidden writing) was the ultimate form of deception. While the Greeks used hidden writing during warfare, at the dawn of the first millennium the Romans adopted it for the art of love. The story of the ancient Greeks and Romans offers us a template for a better understanding of the human need for secret communication and the art of invisible writing.
Kristie Macrakis received her Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University. After rising through the ranks to become full professor at Michigan State University, she will be taking up a new position at the Georgia Institute of Technology in January 2009. She is the author of numerous books and articles, most recently Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (2008), which is a History Book Club selection.
December 11, 2008
Thomas L. Bartlow, Villanova University
“Edward V. Huntington and Engineering Education”
Philadelphia Area Seminar on the History of Mathematics (PASHoM) | Visit site »
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Villanova University
Edward V. Huntington is best known as a prototypical American postulate theorist and as the mathematician behind the method of apportioning Representatives among the states. However, much of his teaching was in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and, in 1907, he became chairman of the Committee on the Teaching of Mathematics to Students of Engineering, a joint committee of the AMS and the AAAS. This led him to become involved in the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education and to write several papers on mathematics and mechanics in the training of engineers.
December 12, 2008
Clifford Rosenberg, City College of New York
“Between France and Algeria: TB and TB Control, c. 1890-1940”
Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 10:15 a.m.
Place: 311 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
Commentator: Helen Tilley, Princeton University
Copies of the paper are available by contacting Jennifer Houle at jhoule@princeton.edu one week before the date of the seminar.
Clifford Rosenberg is Associate Professor of History at CCNY. He specializes in the social and political history of modern Europe, especially France, and on the relationship between the continent and its colonial hinterlands. He has recently published a book on immigration control and the transformation of citizenship in interwar France and is currently working on a study of the spread of tuberculosis from France to North Africa and back, and efforts to combat it, from 1830 to the present.
December 12, 2008
John Tresch, Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Auguste Comte in Paradise: The Ecole Polytechnique, Temporal Series, and the Birth of Sociology
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 p.m., followed by social hour and light dinner
Location: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street
Directions: http://www.hsp.org/default.aspx?id=137
Accessibility: http://www.hsp.org/default.aspx?id=171
Please download and read the paper in advance. (John has heroically reconstructed this paper after a catastrophic computer crash and sends apologies for residual typos. If readers are pressed for time, he suggests skimming section 4 on the Nebular Hypothesis. John will summarize this paper in an extended introduction when we meet.)
Auguste Comte’s sociology was based on an organic conception of the “great being” of humanity; his work has been seen as a turning point
in the development of a qualitative social science. Nevertheless, Comte’s sociology emerged from many of the same sources as the quantitative, “astronomical” approach to society of Quetelet and others. At the Ecole Polytechnique, where Comte and other social prophets were trained, students learned to map and choreograph flows of various phenomena operating at different rates; such techniques, this paper suggests, underwrote many of the schemes of historical development and social engineering in early socialism. Comte’s Religion of Society made the intersections among mathematics, engineering, human history and cosmology strikingly visible. Rather than a scheme of formalist reductionism, positivism was a revolutionary project for the coordination of series, operating at multiple rates, on a cosmic scale; the new “spiritual power” Comte announced was a power of temporalization.