Experimental history of science broadens the range of sources available to historians. Through the practical re-enactment of historical experiments, observations and experiential knowledge can be gained that provide insight into scientific practice. Using research on Brownian motion conducted with the famous oil-drop apparatus as a case study, this article demonstrates how experimental practice can be reconstructed beyond textual sources.
Historical teaching charts are often overlooked in museum collections, despite their potential as valuable sources for the history of science. This article examines how the documentation and contextualisation of such objects can generate new perspectives on scientific practice and knowledge production. It presents a collaborative university seminar at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin in which students from different disciplines systematically documented a dispersed collection of 267 historical teaching charts and developed a documentation framework through object‐based research. Using the teaching chart Anatomie von Helix pomatia as an exemplary case study, the article demonstrates how close examination of a single object reveals connections between scientific illustration, institutional practices, teaching, and the material production of knowledge. Rather than serving merely as visual aids, historical teaching charts emerge as material witnesses to scientific work, preserving traces of their production, use, and historical context. The project illustrates how the systematic documentation of neglected museum objects can provide a foundation for future research, collection management, and preservation. More broadly, it argues that the history of science begins with recognising, documenting, and interpreting material evidence as historical sources.
This paper describes my experience at presenting episodes of history of science in brief radio presentations of 8 to 10 min to a large audience of people interested in science as well as in writing brief essays explaining the dynamic of science using historical cases. The paper describes the constraints of such format and how it differs from writing long and detailed scholarly papers.
This study examines The Forests of Joseon (1938), a forestry survey compiled by Tokumitsu Nobuyuki under Japanese colonial rule, as a key site of epistemic negotiation between imperial forestry science and Korean indigenous knowledge. Focusing on bíbo forests-geomantic forests believed to regulate energy flow between mountains and villages-the paper analyzes how these sites were reclassified as "protection forests" within the functionalist logic of imperial forestry. Drawing on the framework of boundary objects, the study reveals how the same forests were interpreted both as cosmological entities and as disaster prevention infrastructure. While many entries reduce bíbo forests to technical utilities, others-like the Hanjiwon case-retain traces of pungsu cosmology and present forests as nonhuman actors. This tension highlights the partial and uneven nature of colonial knowledge-making, in which local ontologies were subordinated but not fully erased. The paper situates this classificatory project within broader imperial strategies of environmental governance and argues that bíbo forests, despite ontological reduction, continued to exert agentive force. Through a close reading of The Forests of Joseon, the study demonstrates how forests operated as sites of translation between divergent epistemologies, revealing the limits of imperial science and the persistence of relational, cosmological understandings of the environment.
This article will analyze the uncertainties around collecting and classifying Hydnora africana in the first half of the nineteenth century. Emerging from the distinctive dryland ecologies of South Africa, Hydnora was interpreted as strange and cryptic by Europeans primarily because it is a root parasite-a complex floral trait that was little understood. Its unique timescale, dramatic structural change in drying, and resistance to travel made collection extremely difficult,and an inability to collect such plants informed debates on how naturalists could make classifications without seeing them in situ and what characteristics should be prioritized when ordering flowering plants. Attempts at understanding parasitism, therefore, became possible only through global comparisons to other parasitic plants in places like Sumatra, Spain, and the Mediterranean. This created anxieties around authority between the lab and the field, and amateur and professional, testing European scientific methods at the crucial moment in which natural history was fragmenting into disciplines and Linnaean taxonomy became increasingly ineffective. This article thus uses Hydnora africana as a boundary object between shifting geographies, institutions, and epistemologies, demonstrating how the parasitism debate embodied all sorts of questions related to control-over people, places, the natural world-but especially the limits of European knowledge systems.
