By Tom Ritchie, Associate Lecturer and Ph.D. student, University of Kent. On first entering Bar Italia, one is confronted by the overt Italian-ness of the café. From Italian flags to football memorabilia, one can see that the aptly named ‘Bar Italia’ sits easily alongside its peers in Frith Street, Soho, with patrons viewing it as [...]
The BSHS, Britain’s leading community of scientific historians, has conducted a poll to decide who should be pictured on the new £50 bank note. The great majority of both men and women wanted to see this honour go to a woman – and their top choice was Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-58), who has come to symbolise [...]
In the final post in our series about BSHS Engagement Fellowships, we hear about a project at the Polar Museum, at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. Ed Armston-Sheret, PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Charlotte Connelly, curator at the Polar Museum describe how Ed’s research will provide visitors to the [...]
The BSHS is delighted to announce the release of the second in our Translations series. Nils Roll-Hansen's translation of Wilhelm Johannsen's 'About Darwinism, seen from the point of view of the science of heredity' is now freely available on our website. Wilhelm Johannsen is a standard reference in the history of genetics. He clarified the [...]
In the second post in our series about BSHS Engagement Fellowships, we hear about a project at the George Marshall Medical Museum (GMMM) in Worcester. Laura Mainwaring, PhD student at the University of Leicester, and Louise Price, curator at GMMM, describe their collaboration on local historical research that will complement the touring exhibition “Spanish Flu” [...]
Over the last three years the BSHS has run Engagement Fellowships. These Fellowships are opportunities for postgraduate students to collaborate with museums, archives and other heritage organisations. The collaborations generate new engagement activities, exhibition content or resources that are based on emerging scholarship in History of Science. Over the next three weeks we will be [...]
The 2018 BSHS Pickstone Prize has been awarded to Michael Wintroub for his book The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge across the Sixteenth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Judge Charlotte Sleigh, editor of the British Journal for the History of Science, described The Voyage of Thought as: ‘Extraordinary. This book changed my [...]
Adventures in the Anthropocene by Alexander von Humboldt, father of environmentalism Roger Highfield describes a recent encounter between Royal Society science book prize winners Andrea Wulf and Gaia Vince, held in the Science Museum to celebrate Wulf’s latest literary prize, awarded by the British Society for the History of Science. You can listen to Wulf's [...]
By Kersten Hall, University of Leeds When the Czech biologist Vítĕslav Orel wanted to discuss his work, he knew better than to do so in his office or on the telephone. Instead, he would go out onto a busy street where it was far less likely that he would be overheard by the secret police [...]
By Gregory Radick, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds Kirkdale Cave was discovered by quarrymen in the summer of 1821. What made the discovery noteworthy were the cracked fragments of bones packed into – and even sticking out of – the mud caking the cave’s floor, from animals similar to modern hyenas, [...]
