No 66

De Sphaera: Epistemic Communities Shaping Scientific Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

• Matteo Valleriani
• Florian Kräutli
• Dept. I
• Research IT

"De Sphaera" is a university textbook compiled by Johannes de Sacrobosco that was used in European universities for around 400 years, beginning in the first half of the thirteenth cen...

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No 65

Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge

• Carla Bittel
• Elaine Leong
• Christine von Oertzen
• Dept. Daston
• MPG Minerva Research Group

It all began with lunch and three colleagues talking about notebooks. As paper technologies, they noted, notebooks had certainly been recognized by historians as vital instruments for knowledge...

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No 64

Twenty-Four Years of the History of Rationality

• Lorraine Daston
• Dept. Daston

A navigator fixes a course by the stars; a weaver strings a loom with an intricate pattern of colors and shapes; a city official discerns a link between a certain well and the outbreak of an ep...

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No 63

Elephant Ivory, Zoos, and Extinction in the Age of Imperialism (1870s–1940s)

• Marianna Szczygielska
• Dept. III

Elephants are some of the most widely displayed animals in zoos, circuses, and wildlife sanctuaries across the world. Their wild populations in Africa and Asia, however, are at risk of extincti...

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