Search results for "historical geographies of science"
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Science on local, regional, and national scales: geographies of natural history in the mid- to late Victorian England
2022
The history of science has taken a “geographical turn” at the turn of this century. Since then, historians of science have sought to understand the impact of geography on the practice, organisation and diffusion of scientific knowledge. In this paper, I look into the organisation of amateur science in provincial England through the scales of local, regional and national. The scientific societies established in the Victorian Midlands provide an excellent material to understand the close relationship between the natural history societies and geography, which has usually been taken for granted. In the Victorian Midlands, some sixty scientific societies were established for the study of local n…
Provincial Scientific Societies and Publishing: Centre and Peripheries of Publishing Science in late Victorian Britain
2022
Publishing, albeit in many cases irregular, became one of the main activities of provincial scientific societies from the 1860s. In this way, the natural history societies and field clubs contributed to the inflation of scientific publications were thought to disrupt the progress of science. As a remedy, the creation of regional and regular periodicals instead of the publishing by individual societies was suggested. The appearance of the regional federations of natural history societies in the 1870s shows that the need to publish became even greater. The Midland Union of Natural History Societies (1877-1895) was founded with the aim of “imagining” a Midland community of naturalists through …