This study explores the full set of handwritten and printed materials associated with the 1869 publication of the first version of Dmitrii Mendeleev’s periodic system of elements: “An Attempt at a System of Elements Based on Their Atomic Weight and Chemical Affinity.” Using innovative historical research methods, the author has been able to refute the publication date traditionally associated with the first version of the periodic table, as well as to establish an accurate chronology of its subsequent publications. This task was made possible through the discovery of previously unknown handwritten materials in Mendeleev’s personal archive and the Russian State Historical Archive. This typographical analysis of the first publication of Mendeleev’s periodic table represents a rare and unusual opportunity in the history of science: it gives us the chance to observe how, in the process of publishing the results of a scientific study, a researcher comes to realize that what he has discovered is, in fact, a major scientific breakthrough and begins to take the necessary steps toward establishing his scientific priority.

This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

The first eleven volumes of Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences treated science for the most part as an academic, monodisciplinary pursuit of knowledge with little thought of application or contact with wider society. That changed abruptly in 1981 with Volume 12. Ever since, the journal’s name has steadily broadened, while its content has come to include ever more interdisciplinarity and application. The place of science depicted in the journal’s pages is now all of society, including industry and the engineering disciplines. One possible explanation for this shift, associated with Paul Forman, is that technology and applied research achieved cultural primacy over basic science after 1980. On this view, the journal is simply following society’s lead in turning away from basic science. This article argues, instead, that the field of science and technology studies, and its aim to understand science-as-part-of-society, is now taken for granted by the journal’s authors. On this view, the engineering sciences are simply one of several domains (alongside the social sciences, agricultural sciences, and biomedicine) where it is particularly easy to glimpse science’s participation in wider society. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

In the early twentieth century, there was no consensus about the nature of climate. Focusing on ecological understandings of climate, this article contends that the diverse scientific practices used by ecologists to reconstruct past climates resulted in different notions of climate. At the turn of the century, a number of ecologists looked to the geological past to understand climate, but they found different climatic patterns depending on the way they encountered it. Some ecologists, led by Frederic E. Clements, came to believe that the climate displayed cyclical, recurrent patterns after examining tree rings. Others, notably Paul B. Sears, believed that the climate was characterized by unpredictable complexity after examinations of fossil pollen. Their divergent understandings of climate came to a head during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, a severe drought whose effects were amplified by human actions. Both ecologists provided advice to governments and farmers based on their notions of whether or not climate displayed regular periodicity. Their varied assessments of climate reveal broader ideas about interwar science and culture, especially contestations over the capacity of science to predict the future.

This article examines Hebrew translations of World War II–era psychology handbooks as means of transmission for scientific knowledge and as a mechanism for the cross-cultural spread of behavioral modernity. While drawing a broad, vivid picture of transnational military mobilities postwar, the article centers on the story of one such handbook: John Dollard’s Fear in Battle , a 1943 self-help guide on combat behavior. Produced in the context of efforts to manage the morale of American troops, Fear in Battle then traveled overseas along with volunteers, mercenaries, and special advisors from the former Allied powers, and played a role in decolonization and nation-building in the Middle East. The article reconstructs each phase of the text’s geopolitical and institutional itinerary: the experimental work on aversive conditioning that led to its writing and the larger neobehaviorist agenda it formed a part of; its function within the United States Army and subsequent transit to Palestine; and its translation into two new versions that circulated among Jewish militia members during the 1948 Palestine War. Analyzing in detail changes in language, style and format, the article thus aims to unpack the process by which behavioral science had been vernacularized and its mode of explanation went global.

Since the early nineteenth century, a membrane or wall has been central to the cell’s identity as the elementary unit of life. Yet the literally and metaphorically marginal status of the cell membrane made it the site of clashes over the definition of life and the proper way to study it. In this article I show how the modern cell membrane was conceived of by analogy to the first “artificial cell,” invented in 1864 by the chemist Moritz Traube (1826–1894), and reimagined by the plant physiologist Wilhelm Pfeffer (1845–1920) as a precision osmometer. Pfeffer’s artificial cell osmometer became the conceptual and empirical basis for the law of dilute solutions in physical chemistry, but his use of an artificial analogue to theorize the existence of the plasma membrane as distinct from the cell wall prompted debate over whether biology ought to be more closely unified with the physical sciences, or whether it must remain independent as the science of life. By examining how the histories of plant physiology and physical chemistry intertwined through the artificial cell, I argue that modern biology relocated vitality from protoplasmic living matter to non-living chemical substances—or, in broader cultural terms, that the disenchantment of life was accompanied by the (re)enchantment of ordinary matter.