De la digitalización de fondos de la Revista Matemática Hispano-Americana de la JAE al análisis de las revistas científicas del patronato Juan de la Cierva del CSIC

El archivo-biblioteca del Centro de Física Miguel A. Catalán del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), formado por los Institutos de Estructura de la Materia, Física Fundamental y de Óptica Daza de Valdés, ha desarrollado en los últimos años una interesante iniciativa.

Conscientes sus responsables de la importancia y valor histórico de sus archivos comenzaron en 2013 a crear y organizar el archivo de sus fondos documentales con la idea de darles visibilidad. Fruto de ese esfuerzo se han incorporado al portal SIMURG, que reúne la colección de fondos patrimoniales  digitalizados por el CSIC, 75 trabajos originales (manuscritos y mecanografiados) de matemáticos españoles y extranjeros que colaboradon entre 1928 y 1933 en la Revista Matemática Hispano-Americana, cuya existencia se dilató entre 1919 y 1982, y que fue impulsada en su etapa inicial por Julio Rey Pastor y los integrantes del Laboratorio y Seminario Matemático de la JAE.

Ejercicios resueltos, 1929

 Los trabajos originales incluyen artículos científicos y colaboraciones en las distintas secciones de la revista tales como bibliografía, cuestiones propuestas o cuestiones resueltas, notas, ejercicios elementales, glosarios, etc. En muchos casos se conservan, junto con los manuscritos, las galeradas o pruebas de imprenta, además de figuras y dibujos, envoltorios y sobres de envío, que permiten mostrar el recorrido que los autores seguían para publicar un trabajo desde su redacción hasta su publicación final. De este modo, aspectos como la reutilización y aprovechamiento del papel, las notas y correcciones, los tipos de letra y firma, que pueden rastrearse a lo largo de estos documentos, son otro aliciente más para apreciar el valor histórico de este fondo que gracias al esfuerzo de Flora Granizo se ha incorporado a  SIMURG.

Ver Colección del Fondo en Simurg

Ver artículo en EnRedadera nº28

Este proceso de composición de los artículos de revistas científicas, además de otros muchos aspectos en un singular encuentro metodológico entre la historia del libro y la historia de la ciencia, ha sido analizado por Fernando García Naharro para el caso de las diversas revistas científicas y técnicas impulsadas por el patronato «Juan de la Cierva» del CSIC durante las décadas de 1940 y 1950. Así lo ha hecho en la tesis doctoral titulada «El papel de la ciencia. Publicaciones científicas y técnicas durante el franquismo (1939-1966)», y defendida con brillantez en la Facultad de Geografía e Historia de la Universidad Complutense el 21 de febrero de 2017 ante un tribunal presidido por Elena Hernández-Sandoica, e integrado también por los profesores e investigadores Jean-François Botrel, Agustí Nieto-Galán, Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal y el autor de esta bitácora. La tesis ha sido dirigida por Jesús A. Martínez Martín.

Importante tesis doctoral de Rosemarie Terán sobre historia de la educación en el Ecuador

El martes 24 de marzo de 2015 se ha presentado en el departamento de Historia de la Educación y Educación Comparada de la UNED, en Madrid, la tesis doctoral de Rosemarie Terán Najas «La escolarización de la vida: el esfuerzo de construcción de la modernidad educativa en el Ecuador (1821-1921)», dirigida por Gabriela Ossenbach.

Rosemarie Terán fue una de mis compañeras en la Primera Maestría en Historia Andina, que organizó la sede de Quito de FLACSO, allá por el curso 1984-1985. Tiempo después ha sido muy satisfactorio y gratificante para mí haber sido uno de los primeros lectores de su tesis doctoral y haber participado en el tribunal que la ha evaluado positivamente junto a  Antonio Viñao, presidente del tribunal, y Miguel Somoza.

En su investigación Rosemarie Terán ha pretendido explorar “la significación política y dimensiones sociales de la educación pública a través de los mecanismos de inclusión/exclusión presentes en los modelos de ciudadanía y en las prácticas de escolarización” y se ha interesado por indagar “cómo el saber pedagógico se representó al sujeto escolarizado en diversos momentos históricos y las formas de inclusión del mismo en el universo de la educación pública”. Ese doble objetivo ha orientado sus indagaciones en los tres grandes períodos que han sido determinantes en el papel jugado por la educación en la construcción del Estado ecuatoriano durante su primer siglo de existencia aproximadamente.

El primero fue el del despegue de la educación propiamente republicana y de su importante proyección institucional que contrasta con la inestabilidad política de esa etapa que corresponde aproximadamente al período 1830-1857. Este momento es el objeto de análisis del primer capítulo de la tesis.

El segundo período abarca la segunda mitad del siglo XIX cuando se consolidó un sistema educativo confesional ligado al proyecto de creación de la «república católica», iniciado en la presidencia de Gabriel García Moreno y continuado bajo los gobiernos moderados católicos que preceden a la revolución liberal de 1895. El estudio de esa fase es abordado en dos capítulos, correspondientes a la época garciana y a la etapa del «progresismo».

El tercer momento abarcaría desde el inicio de la revolución liberal en 1895 y el fin de la primera misión pedagógica alemana hacia 1920, período que está marcado por la implantación de la educación laica, ligada a la constitución del Estado liberal. Este período es analizado en los capítulos cuarto y quinto.

De esta manera el índice de esta tesis es el siguiente:

Introducción

1. La construcción de la escuela pública republicana: discursos, prácticas de escolarización y actores sociales emergentes.- 1.1. La función social de la educación en el discurso republicano.- 1.2. Los sentidos de lo público.- 1.3. La escolaridad en el Departamento del Sur.- 1.4. La política para la instrucción primaria entre 1830-1857.- 1.4.1. La expansión escolar en el período marcista.- 1.5. La emergencia de la subjetividad femenina en el marco de la enseñanza mutua.- 1.5.1 La novela La emancipada.- 1.5.2. El camino sin salida de las mujeres letradas

2. La modernidad educativa del catolicismo garciano.- 2.1. El garcianismo en la historiografía nacional.- 2.2. Rasgos del sistema escolar garciano.- 2.2.1. La transición hacia el modelo simultáneo.- 2.3.. Las escuela y la república católica: El Método Productivo para la enseñanza primaria (1869).- 2.3..1 La escuela como República.- 2.3.2. El «arte de la pedagogía».

3. La expansión de la educación católica durante el progresismo.- 3.1. El contexto político del proyecto educativo.- 3.1.1. Actores y discursos de la gestión educativa progresista.- 3.2. Réplicas al anticlericalismo en la «escuela doméstica» de Mera.- 3.3. La escolaridad progresista: mecanismos de expansión.- 3.3.1. El restablecimiento de la educación pública católica.- 3.3.2. La expansión escolar en el progresismo tardío.- 3.4. Los colegios católicos nacionales y la importancia de la educación femenina.

4. Reforma educativa y revolución liberal.- 4.1. Educación y ciudadanía en el proyecto educativo liberal.- 4.2. El debate de 1906: nación y secularización de la enseñanza.- 4.2.1. ¿La soberanía residen en el pueblo o en la nación?.- 4.2.2. La declaración de la educación laica.- 4.3. Rasgos del aparato educativo laico.- 4.3.1. La enseñanza secundaria.- 4.4. La escolaridad secularizada.

5. Los docentes laicos ante la «pedagogía moderna» y la educación pública. 5.1. El escenario pedagógico nacional ante la llegada de la primera misión alemana.- 5.1.1. La enseñanza intuitiva-objetiva: un campo de saber y de legitimidad del maestro.5.1.2.  La interpelación al texto escolar.- 5.1.3. Diálogo entre el positivismo pedagógico y la enseñanza intuitiva en la obra del pedagogo Fernando Pons.- 5.1.4. La experiencia de la enseñanza intuitiva en el liberalismo posalfarista.- 5.2. La educación popular a debate: enseñanza intuitiva versus herbartismo.- 5.2.1. Papel de la revista El Magisterio Ecuatoriano en la organización docente y la «construcción social del currículo». 5.3. Los imaginarios de la infancia escolarizada en El Lector Ecuatoriano (1915).- 5.3.1.El escenario de producción del texto: Guayaquil en 1915.- 5.3.2. Moral, virtud y patriotismo.- 5.3.3. Las representaciones visuales sobre la infancia.

En mi opinión esta tesis doctoral supone un importante esfuerzo de recuperación de parte del andamiaje discursivo, institucional, político y pedagógico de los cambios educativos que se emprendieron en el Ecuador en momentos específicos de su historia. Su autora ha procurado detectar la respuesta social a los mismos desde historias individuales y dinámicas colectivas. Se muestra asimismo a lo largo del desarrollo de la tesis cómo se hicieron visibles las diferencias de concepción sobre la educación pública en los diversos momentos de disputa entre católicos y liberales por conseguir la hegemonía en el diseño y control de los procesos educativos. Y se ilustra, de manera convincente a mi modo de ver, en su parte final el protagonismo de los maestros en las reformas educativas impulsadas después de la constitución de 1906 planteando la autora de la tesis que la educación primaria popular fue el verdadero campo de gestación del maestro laico y de su desarrollo profesional y no tanto la influencia de enfoques pedagógicos transferidos por las Misiones Alemanas que operaron en el Ecuador a partir de 1913, como ha venido sosteniendo la historiografía ecuatoriana. Esos maestros laicos se esforzaron por hacer apropiaciones del saber pedagógico generado en otras partes de Europa y las Américas, adaptándolas al contexto ecuatoriano desde una perspectiva universalista, dado el carácter transnacional del liberalismo.

La revolución industrial británica y su impacto tecnológico desde la historia de la ciencia

chromolithograph Caricature of Thomas Henry Huxley. Caption read «A great Med’cine-Man among the Inqui-ring Redskins». (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Watt’s steam engine at the lobby of the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineering of Madrid (part of the UPM). es:user:Ecemaml took it from Enciclopedia Libre Español: Máquina de vapor situada en el vestíbulo de la Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales de la UPM (Madrid) Obtenida de la Enciclopedia Libre (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

En el sitio web Dissertations localizo la siguiente reseña sobre una importante tesis doctoral.

Por su relevancia para quienes se interesan por las vinculaciones entre ciencia y tecnología durante la revolución industrial merece la pena que tenga un hueco en esta bitácora.

A review of Machine Past, Machine Future: Technology in British Thought, c.1870-1914 , by Daniel C.S. Wilson.

Although historians often revel in uncovering the origins of concepts, ideas, and words that people assume have always been there, they frequently have blind spots when it comes to thinking historically about the tools that they use to analyze the past. One of those ideas is the “Industrial Revolution” – not the empirical facts of increased industrial productivity but the idea of an industrial revolution having taken place at a particular point and place in time. Another is “technology” – in particular its relationship to machines and machinery. Although both of those ideas are part of the intellectual furniture in history of science, technology, and medicine, few historians are aware of the ways in which they emerged from a particular set of historical and intellectual circumstances. Daniel Wilson’s dissertation is a searching exploration of those circumstances and an account of how, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, the meaning of technology was debated in ways that are hugely significant for our understanding not just of that period but the ideas and concepts we work with now.

As its title suggests, Machine Past, Machine Future is divided into two parts, both chronologically and thematically. Part one, “Machine Past,” investigates the intellectual context in which technology was conceived of during the late nineteenth century, in particular how machines and machinery emerged as conceptual and analytic categories. Wilson explores that emergence through close study of important but surprisingly underused sources. These sources include the reports of the mid- to late nineteenth-century meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which are examined in Chapter 1, and the writings of key thinkers, including Arnold Toynbee (who first coined the term “industrial revolution”), the historians William Cunningham and W. J. Ashley, and the economist J. A. Hobson, who are examined in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. Those Chapters show how central to intellectual life questions about machines and machinery were during the late nineteenth century through close analysis of books, articles, public lectures, and debates. In addition to throwing new light on a number of sources that scholars might consider well-known, Wilson reveals how complex ideas about machines were embedded in an emerging narrative of and discussion about Britain’s past, through which the idea of the “Industrial Revolution” was established. Moreover, Wilson uncovers how those ideas were rooted in evaluations of the changes that had been wrought during the previous 100 years – something that has subsequently been lost.

Part two, “Machine Future,” then uses that examination of late nineteenth-century debates about machinery and their impact on the building of narratives about the past as the basis for a discussion of one of the most distinctive intellectual features of the early twentieth century: the kind of speculation on the future that we would label “futurology” or “science fiction.” As Wilson shows in a close study of H.G. Wells’ writings, and his debates with G.K. Chesterton and Arthur Penty, machines assumed a new role in the early 1900s when they became the foundation for thinking about the relationship between the present and the future as well as the present and the past. In fact, the concept of the machine that had emerged as a tool for thinking critically about the past became a tool for thinking critically about technological trends. In particular, machines and machinery became concepts that enabled thinking about the relationship between humans and technology, including technology’s potential consequences, whether they be economic, cultural, or political.

In navigating its way through these issues, Machine Past, Machine Future is highly sophisticated, both historiographically and conceptually, and reveals the origins of our approaches to technology. On the one hand, and building on the kind of work done by Thomas Dixon on the history of altruism, Wilson documents and explores the emergence of not just particular words and terms but the concepts and ideas that were entangled with them (Thomas Dixon. The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). In this respect, Machine Past, Machine Future is a story of the negotiation of meanings associated with terms, including technology, which are now commonplace but were once up for grabs. On the other hand, Machine Past, Machine Future is an archetypal piece of Skinnerean intellectual history that takes individuals and their work and puts them back into the historical contexts in which they existed to reveal the meanings they once held but have subsequently lost. Wilson shines fresh light, for example, on what the idea of an “Industrial Revolution” meant to Arnold Toynbee, whilst simultaneously recovering the depths and dynamics of Hobson’s writings on empire and capitalism, which scholars routinely pass over. Moreover, Wilson weaves those insights into a broader narrative about the emergence and transformation of a complex set of ideas about machinery. In so doing, he recaptures the intellectual vitality and dynamism of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, showing it to have been the foundation of so much we now take for granted.

While interrogating the origins of the conceptual framework for thinking about machines and technology, Machine Past, Machine Future achieves a number of sophisticated aims. On the one hand, Wilson successfully eschews the alluring narrative of professionalization that dominates the historiography of late nineteenth-century science. As Paul White has argued in his work on T. H. Huxley, historians of science have often been led too easily from the well-known coining of the term “scientist” by William Whewell in the 1830s to the conclusion that everybody wanted to be a specialist or professional from that point onwards (Thomas Huxley: Making the ‘Man of Science’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Instead, many people, including Huxley, avoided the label “scientist” for some time, believing it to be too narrow to represent their broader visions. Machine Past, Machine Future reconnects with those broader visions – the thinkers who were specialists in the sense that they possessed detailed and professional knowledge of a specific field, but who also aimed to work between the lines of different disciplines so that they could capture the bigger picture. Wilson is successful in impressing upon the reader not just how that holistic enterprise is necessary for understanding the thinkers he explores but also the period as a whole. What is clear is that if we do not reconnect with those visions, we will never come close to understanding how those thinkers understood themselves.

In these respects, Wilson’s work makes a number of incredibly important historiographic contributions. One of these contributions is to the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, in particular how that historiography is handled within history of science. As Jonathan Hodge has argued in his recent work on the capitalist contexts for Darwinism, historians of science have operated and continue to operate with hazy understandings of the industrial revolution, especially when compared to the their colleagues in conventional history departments, who moved away from homogeneous understandings of nineteenth-century capitalism and industry some time ago («Capitalist Contexts for Darwinian Theory: Land, Finance, Industry and Empire.» Journal of the History of Biology 42 (2009): 399-416). Drawing on Boyd Hilton, P. J. Cain, and A. G. Hopkins, Hodge has explored the implications of a more sophisticated understanding of capitalism’s different stages of development for our understanding of Darwin’s work and its reception. In this spirit, Wilson has uncovered the contexts in which life was first breathed into the idea of an “Industrial Revolution,” throwing light on all kinds of interesting issues, from the original evaluative meaning of the term to its place in debates about the identity of the emerging history profession, whose practitioners frequently aspired to scientific status and therefore uniformitarian rather than catastrophist explanations of phenomena.

Machine Past, Machine Future’s biggest achievement, however, is the way it skilfully and successfully integrates past, present, and future when considering its significance for the history of science. More specifically, the dissertation’s strongest point is the way it integrates the history of ideas with intellectual history and the history of technology, while reflecting on not only the significance of that approach for a number of different historiographies but also the historical processes that make it necessary at all. As Wilson rightly observes, the historiography of technology has come to be dominated by a particular view of technology, which emphasises human and social control over those artefacts. As the contents of Machine Past, Machine Future make clear, though, things were not always thus. Broader visions of technology were cultivated in the past in the belief that holistic and multi-disciplinary approaches were necessary to understand and evaluate machines and their relationships with humans. In this respect, Machine Past, Machine Future offers insights into the work of a large number of historians of technology, from Leo Marx to David Edgerton, and the trajectory taken by the historiography of technology since the interwar period. Moreover, and just as importantly, Wilson demonstrates that the thinkers he explores are more than just historical relics by showing how their work has the potential to inform the way we think about technology now. Indeed, Machine Past, Machine Future shows that the past is not just a static entity but a dynamic site of intellectual possibilities when it comes to thinking about the future of our disciplines.

Chris Renwick

Department of History

University of York

Chris.Renwick@York.ac.uk

Primary Sources

Reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science

Arnold Toynbee, papers and published writings

H. G. Wells, published writings

G. K. Chesterton, papers and published writings

J. A. Hobson, papers and published writings

Dissertation Information

Birkbeck, University of London. 2010. 288 pp. Primary Advisor: Daniel Pick.

Image: Arnold Toynbee. Frontispiece to L.L.F.R.Price, Industrial Peace: Its Advantages, Methods And Difficulties, London, Macmillan and Company (1887). Wikimedia Commons.

Chris Renwick | October 2, 2013 at 12:01 am | URL: http://wp.me/p1MHRV-1kq

Tesis doctoral sobre la construcción de la geología en la Inglaterra del primer tercio del siglo XIX

Duria Antiquior famous watercolor by the geologist Henry de la Beche depicting life in ancient Dorset based on fossils found by Mary Anning. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Me hago eco de la reseña de Jennifer Feng, de la Universidad de Sydney, de la tesis doctoral de Leucha Veneer, «Practical and Economic Interests in the Making of Geology in late Georgian England».

Significa una interesante contribución a la historia intelectual de la geología y a los estudios sobre la ciencia de la tierra.

A review of Practical and Economic Interests in the Making of Geology in late Georgian England, by Leucha Veneer.

Practical and economic interests are often overlooked in favor of the theoretical advancements that put British geologists on the international stage during the nineteenth century. Leucha Veneer’s dissertation brings to life some of the unnoticed contributions made by members of local mineralogical societies who sought to use mining as a means of understanding the earth. Framing geologists as bankers, chemists, mining engineers, naturalists, and surgeons gives new identities to scientists who were typically much more than merely professional gentlemen. These mining enthusiasts established museums, improved technologies, published journals, and hosted public lectures. Veneer seeks to pick up where histories from geologists Sir Archibald Geikie (1897) and Horace B. Woodward (1907) have left off, highlighting the more quotidian pursuits that have enlivened the study of rocks (Archibald Geikie, The Founders of Geology, 1897; Horace Woodward, The History of the Geological Society of London, 1907).

Provincial science, as Veneer calls it, was embedded in the practical problems of geology sometimes ignored by well-known men such as Henry de la Beche or Roderick Murchison. She points out that Arnold Thackray and Steven Shapin’s pioneering scholarship, while influential, is in dire need of revision (Arnold Thackray, “Natural knowledge in cultural context: The Manchester model,” American Historical Review 79 (1974): 672-709; Steven Shapin, “The Pottery Philosophical Society, 1819-1835: An examination of the cultural uses of provincial science,” Science Studies 2 (1972): 311-336). Their reluctance to focus upon the potential of mining, agriculture, and canal building, in fact, leaves out rich material for historians of science. Veneer argues that more grey zones exist — between the rigid categories of elite, accomplished, and amateur scientists — than initially conceived by Martin Rudwick (Martin Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985; Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Leucha Veneer’s detailed consideration of these developments lends itself to examining lesser-known figures in the history of English geology within their respective institutional contexts. Through a close analysis of society records, correspondence, and journals, Veneer stresses the wide spectrum of individuals who pulled geology in vastly different directions.

The dissertation is divided into the geographic areas of London, Cornwall, Newcastle, and Yorkshire, and it functions effectively as an episodic survey of case studies that offers a diverse view of English geology during the Georgian period. Veneer aims to produce “a new image of the discipline which considers the different motivations of practitioners symmetrically” (p. 25) counter to the claims put forth by Roy Porter’s 1973 paper “The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the science of geology” (see Roy Porter, “The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the science of geology” in Mikulas Teich and Robert Young (eds.), Changing Perspectives in the History of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, 320-343; Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain, 1660-1815, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Tracing the connections between city centers and outlying regions of England, Veneer seeks to demonstrate how critical trans-provincial contributions in geology were founded upon practical concerns. National prominence became a common desire for many of these societies, which strove to publicize and disseminate their findings in a timely manner.

Chapter 1 lays out the major themes of the dissertation, including historiographical treatment of existing studies on the history of the earth, the aims of provincial science, and communication networks among scientists at large. Veneer employs James Secord’s concept of “knowledge in transit” to illustrate how local sites and spaces gave rise to nuanced scientific knowledge among these societies (p. 34) (Secord, “Knowledge in transit” Isis 95 (2004): 654-672). She emphasizes her approach to “local profiling” in order to consider each set of societies in terms of its specific circumstances.

Chapter 2 takes a similar approach to practical geology in relation to some of the well-known institutions based in London at the time. Veneer foregrounds specific individuals who were essential in founding some of these organizations. For example, Unitarian minister Reverend William Turner mapped local coal fields and improved mining conditions more generally. Many of the collections established by the British Mineralogical Society were meant for educational purposes and to acquire mining terms from across the country that could be assembled into a dictionary (p. 50). One of the more notable contributions that Veneer emphasizes is George Bellas Greenough’s mapping venture to document the edges of England and Wales. On this map, coal districts were typically designated as important resources that would come under state control.

In Chapter 3, Veneer turns her attention to the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall (RGSC). Mining in western Cornwall was a significant industry, responsible for a large amount of copper, up to two-thirds of world production. The Cornish tribute system did not pay its workers with hourly wages. Tutworkers responsible for sinking shafts were paid by a measure of the ground they excavated while tributers were paid a proportion of the ore that they produced (p. 74). Health and safety hazards were among the blatant dangers that mining presented.

Chapters 4 and 5 converge on practitioners in Newcastle and Yorkshire. One of the Newcastle members John Buddle was a colliery viewer for a number of pits along the Tyne, commanding a salary of over 1000 pounds. His expertise was commissioned from as far away as Portugal, Russia, and South America (p. 131). The Hancock Museum established by the Natural History Society of Northumberland exhibited curiosities from birds, stuffed animals, and a few minerals. It acted as a locus for promoting local knowledge of geology in the region and concerns for public education. The Yorkshire Museum and its gardens likewise grew from donations and came to represent the county of York as whole. These collections were also intended to be instrumental in hosting scientific forums for John Phillips and other colleagues.

Chapters 6 and 7 respectively attempt to bring together a holistic picture of these local geological societies and pose new questions of the discipline. The four case studies are summarized to elucidate how the historiographical picture of provincial science may be expanded. Mapping initiatives, museums, and mining schools occurred in parallel to many of the gentlemanly activities organized by scientists back in London. The last two chapters will be useful for historians of science concerned with the intersections of provincial science, state-funded endeavors, and military projects.

This dissertation will be essential reading for anyone broadly interested in the intellectual history of geology and nineteenth-century accounts of Georgian and Victorian scientific collections. Veneer’s thesis makes a valuable contribution to studies on the earth sciences, allowing practitioners to assume their rightful place next to the eminent men of geology.

Jennifer Ferng
Lecturer in Architecture
Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Planning
University of Sydney
jennifer.ferng@sydney.edu.au

Primary Sources

British Mineralogical Society
Geological and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding of Yorkshire
Geological Society, London
Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, Penzance

Dissertation Information

University of Leeds. 2009. 264 pp. Primary Advisors: John Christie and Jonathan Topham.

Tesis doctoral de Julie McDougall sobre la producción de atlas escolares británicos entre 1870 y 1936

En el repositorio digital de la Universidad de Edimburgo (ERA Edinburgh Research Archive) se puede acceder a la importante tesis doctoral de Julie McDougall «Publishing history  and development of school atlases and British geography, c. 1870-c.1930″

Su abstract es el siguiente:

My concern in this thesis is with the production of British school atlases between 1870 and 1930.

I interpret this particular genre of map and book through the rich resource of the Bartholomew Archive, which holds the business and personal records of the Edinburgh mapmaking firm John Bartholomew & Son.

School atlases were instrumental in the dissemination of geographical knowledge at a time when geographers were moulding their subject’s place in the universities and schools in Britain and in parts of the Empire beyond.

This thesis builds on concepts in the history of the book, the history of the map and archive history in order to gain knowledge about the people and processes through which this particular type of mapbook was produced, moved and used, and to understand how it was bound up in the development of a discipline.

In chapter 1, I outline the main themes of the thesis.

The theoretical and methodological ideas underlying it are reviewed in detail in chapter 2.

Chapter 3 illuminates the themes threading through the following empirical chapters, providing insight into school atlas production through a consideration of Bartholomew’s production ledgers and what these reveal about the nature of geographical publishing.

Interactions between individual atlas producers form the focus of chapter 4, particularly negotiations between publishers, mapmakers, geographers and other professionals over the meaning of ‘author’.

In chapter 5, I go on to address atlas production in relation to the pedagogy of regional geography used in schools and, particularly, its impact on school atlases for pupils in ‘local’ settings across the UK.

This leads in chapter 6 to an interpretation of how this localising of school atlases was adapted to readers’ locations throughout the British Empire.

Questions about readers’ role in the shaping of textual meaning are considered further in chapter 7, which draws on specific instances of producer-reader-atlas interactions to support the argument that reading and reviewing were processes conducted not only, as I show, by readers on the published text but, as I also indicate, they were practices performed by both producers and readers during atlas production.

My findings in this thesis shed light on the publishing history of British school atlases, hitherto largely unexamined by historians of the map and historians of geography, and they contribute to our understanding of the production, movement and use of geographical knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Tesis doctoral sobre el papel de las mujeres irlandesas en la educación, el deporte y la medicina

Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh. Quiet Revolutionaries: Irish Women in Education, Sport and Medicine, 1861-1964. Stroud: History Press, 2011. 256 pp. $17.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84588-696-7.

Reviewed by Jennifer Redmond (Bryn Mawr)
Published on H-Albion (September, 2013)
Commissioned by Nicholas M. Wolf

Irish Women in Education, Sport, and Medicine

This publication is a compendium of essays that have been crafted over the years by Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh on the subject of Irish women and their historical relationships to education, medicine, and sport. The book therefore provides a concise and powerful statement of her voluminous research in the area of Irish women’s history, addressing material spanning over one hundred years and multiple areas of thematic interest.

Education is the first theme tackled in Quiet Revolutionaries, constituting six chapters in the collection along with a seventh that overlaps with the theme of health. Ó hÓgartaigh takes up the question of women’s experiences as students and teachers, with a slightly heavier emphasis on the latter. The essays range from the legislative changes in the nineteenth century that regularized secondary education and finally allowed women access to the universities, to examining education from the viewpoint of personal memoir. Together the essays give a clear exposition of the key moments and players in the expansion of the educational sphere for women. Ó hÓgartaigh rightly points out that this expansion did not translate into women’s full access to the professions once they were educated. Furthermore, the gendered nature of the rhetoric of the time is highlighted, from fears about women’s physical capacity to learn in the nineteenth century to the battles for equal pay and status for teachers in Ireland that continuously cropped up.

A second section focusing on medicine and health has nine dedicated essays, in addition to the comparative essay on women in nursing and teaching, although these are not of equal length. These essays draw on Ó hÓgartaigh’s work on individual women in the medical profession and are supplemented by interesting case studies from diverse geographical locations, including comparisons between Ireland and the United States and Australia. Comparative histories are difficult to write, thus Ó hÓgartaigh is to be commended for this approach. She points out that pioneer women in the medical profession often gravitated toward maternal and fetal care, developing pediatric care in Ireland and establishing hospitals for women and children. This was partly influenced by society’s views of women and appropriate feminine characteristics that could be applied to the field: kindness, empathy, and “natural” maternal instincts. According to Ó hÓgartaigh’s analysis, some Irish women in the medical field appropriated this rhetoric, focusing on women’s special role as mothers as being important in promoting public health. However, women’s important role in the elimination of tuberculosis is also highlighted, thus Ó hÓgartaigh’s essays allow for a more complex view of women in the medical field to emerge. What is interestingly alluded to is the class dimension of the approach to medical and social care in twentieth-century Ireland, something that marred the efforts of those involved in social and moral welfare. The tragic and complicated histories resulting from these interventions have been increasingly coming to light in recent years.

Margaret MacCurtain’s foreword encourages the author to delve deeper into the histories of women in sport in Ireland, and indeed, with just two essays on sporting themes, the collection could have included more material on this interesting and under-researched topic of women’s modern lives. Women and sport in Irish history is a newer vein of inquiry and these essays may provide the jumping off point for scholars interested in mining new territory. Ó hÓgartaigh makes the interesting point that women in Ireland were playing camogie before women were allowed to compete in the track and field competitions of the Olympics. She further highlights the fact that the participation of women in athletics was condemned as “unfeminine” and improper by the Catholic Church. Both these findings merit further exposition: did the condemnation of Pope Pius XI have an impact at the local community level in Ireland where sport was so integrally connected with politics and national identity? Possibly the most intriguing essay comes in chapter 19 on women’s use of tampons and vigorous physical exercise in public, the inimical attitudes of John Charles McQuaid surfacing again to oppose women’s participation in mixed athletics in the 1930s. Ó hÓgartaigh satirizes thinking by the bishops in the 1940s that tampons were a contraceptive, and interestingly she speculates that “the more pertinent fear was that women might derive sexual stimulation from tampax” (p. 177). This intersection of medical and moral concern over women’s personal hygiene products, a topic that gets right to the heart of historical questions over long-standing anxieties centering on the feminine body in sport, is one that deserves further attention as more scholars follow Ó hÓgartaigh’s lead.

The collection ends with an essay on women in paid work in Ireland built around the comments of a local Kells, county Meath, councilor printed in 1925 in the Meath Chronicle, using the published views as an entryway for understanding the position of professional women in Ireland of the time. The chosen councilor, Mr. Tully, espoused traditional views of women’s place as being within the home rather than the public sphere, predicting calamity for the country as a result of women’s increasing participation in paid work. This was fairly standard rhetoric of the time, and Ó hÓgartaigh’s approach is to analyze his statements in depth, breaking down his claims one by one, and providing evidence to refute much of his overblown statements.

It would be helpful if the chapter titles indicated in a note where and when they were originally published as is often done with reprinted academic works. Although the table of contents lists where each chapter was originally published, this information does not appear in the titles of the chapters themselves. This is particularly relevant in the first chapter, a scan of sources, which has much relevant information in it, but does not include any online source material, being written in 1999, before the advent of many of the important digital databases now available on Irish women’s history. Ó hÓgartaigh could perhaps have updated this chapter to reflect what source material, or even archival catalogues, are now available online. It is to be assumed that none of the other chapters were updated either in light of republication–this is not a critique, but rather it could have been made explicit.

Quiet Revolutionaries will appeal to a wide audience, and the brevity of many of the essays will mean that it is a book that will bear nonlinear and thematic reading. The format will also make the book useful as a teaching tool, with helpfully concise essays that could easily enliven an undergraduate course, particularly those on women in education and the professions.