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Feeding the People
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 321

Feeding the People

Almost no one knew what a potato was in 1500. Today they are the world's fourth most important food. How did this happen?

Making the Green Revolution
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 342

Making the Green Revolution

In November 2017, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at its headquarters outside Palmira, Colombia. As an important research center of the so-called Green Revolution in agricultural science and technologies, CIAT emphasizes its contributions to sustainability, food security, gender equity, inclusive markets, and resilient, climate-smart agriculture. Yet these terms hardly describe the Cauca Valley where CIAT is physically located, a place that has been transformed into an industrial monoculture of sugarcane where thirteen Colombian corporations oversee the vast majority of this valley's famously fertile soil. This exemplifies the para...

Trading Environments
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 331

Trading Environments

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2015-12-07
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  • Publisher: Routledge

This volume examines dynamic interactions between the calculative and speculative practices of commerce and the fruitfulness, variability, materiality, liveliness and risks of nature. It does so in diverse environments caught up in new trading relationships forged on and through frontiers for agriculture, forestry, mining and fishing. Historical resource frontiers are understood in terms of commercial knowledge systems organized as projects to transform landscapes and environments. The book asks: how were environments traded, and with what environmental and landscape consequences? How have environments been engineered, standardized and transformed within past trading systems? What have been ...

The Politics of Chemistry
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 311

The Politics of Chemistry

Agust Nieto-Galan argues that chemistry in the twentieth century was deeply and profoundly political. Far from existing in a distinct public sphere, chemical knowledge was applied in ways that created strong links with industrial and military projects, and national rivalries and international endeavours, that materially shaped the living conditions of millions of citizens. It is within this framework that Nieto-Galan analyses how Spanish chemists became powerful ideological agents in different political contexts, from liberal to dictatorial regimes, throughout the century. He unveils chemists' position of power in Spain, their place in international scientific networks, and their engagement in fierce ideological battles in an age of extremes. Shared discourses between chemistry and liberalism, war, totalitarianism, religion, and diplomacy, he argues, led to advancements in both fields.

Health in the Highlands
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 383

Health in the Highlands

"In the early to mid-twentieth century, the governments of Ecuador and Guatemala sought to expand Western medicine within their countries, with the goals of addressing endemic diseases and improving infant and maternal health. These efforts often clashed with indigenous medical practices, particularly in the rural highlands. Drawing on extensive, original archival research, historian David Carey Jr. shows that indigenous populations embraced a syncretic approach to health, combining traditional and new practices. At times, the governments of both nations encouraged--or at least allowed--such a synthesis, yet they also attacked indigenous lifeways, going so far as to criminalize native medica...

Founders of the Future
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 277

Founders of the Future

In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Here, Useche offers fresh readings of canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors.

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song and Dance
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 524

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song and Dance

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados is an exploration of two fandango dances, recording the circulations of people, imagery, music, and dance across what were once the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Although these dance-musics seem to be mirror images, the unbreachable space between them reflects the political fault-lines along which nineteenth-century musical populism and folkloric nationalism extend into present-day debates about globalization, immigration, neoliberalism, and neofascism. If malagueñas are a fantastic incarnation of Spanishness, caught like a fly in amber by their anachronistic references to a fraught imperial past, noisy and raucous zapateado dances cut toward the future. Inherently marked by European conventions of zapatos (shoes), zapateados are nonetheless shaped by Africanist and Native American footwork traditions. In these Afro-Indigenous mestizajes, not only are European aesthetic values reordered and resignified, but the Catholic catechism which indoctrinated the New World yields to alternate spiritual systems springing out of a culture of resistance to European domination.

Higher and Colder
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 265

Higher and Colder

During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking. Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to ...

Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 351

Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2016-03-23
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  • Publisher: Routledge

The vast majority of European countries have never had a Newton, Pasteur or Einstein. Therefore a historical analysis of their scientific culture must be more than the search for great luminaries. Studies of the ways science and technology were communicated to the public in countries of the European periphery can provide a valuable insight into the mechanisms of the appropriation of scientific ideas and technological practices across the continent. The contributors to this volume each take as their focus the popularization of science in countries on the margins of Europe, who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may be perceived to have had a weak scientific culture. A variety of scient...

La ciencia como diálogo entre teorías, textos y lenguas
  • Language: es
  • Pages: 346

La ciencia como diálogo entre teorías, textos y lenguas

Los artículos reunidos en este volumen se ocupan de la comunicación científica desde una perspectiva tanto histórica como actual, poniendo énfasis en una característica esencial del desarrollo de las ciencias: el intercambio de ideas, textos y experiencias que contribuye a aumentar, contrastar y modificar los conocimientos alcanzados. Entendida como interacción dialógica, la comunicación científica se despliega entre culturas, grupos de expertos y colectivos sociales, así como entre comunidades de práctica científica y de habla. Las distintas contribuciones del volumen enfocan el diálogo como la esencia de la apropiación de teorías y textos que se da entre los científicos mismos, científicos y legos, pero también entre los traductores y los textos traducidos. Estos estudios conciben, por tanto, la transmisión del saber como una conversación con los textos de la que deriva una determinada interpretación de lo que significa el conocimiento científico.