'The goddess that we serve': projecting international community at the first serial chemistry conferences, 1893-1914.

The emergence of conferences in the late nineteenth century significantly changed the ways in which the international scientific community functioned and experienced itself. In the early modern Republic of Letters, savants mainly related through print and correspondence, and apart from at local and later national levels, scholars rarely met. International conferences, by contrast, brought scientists together regularly, in the flesh and in great numbers.

The art of gathering: histories of international scientific conferences.

Hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century, yet the history of science has often treated them as stages for scientific practice, not as the play itself. Drawing on recent work in the history of science and of international relations, the introduction to this special issue suggests avenues for exploring the phenomenon of the international scientific conference, broadly construed, by highlighting the connected dimensions of communication, sociability and international relations. It lays out a typology of scientific conferences as a way of gaining an overview of their diversity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Afterword: Science popularization, dictatorships, and democracies.

This Afterword to the special section on Science Popularization in Francoist Spain draws general conclusions from its case studies. Most overarchingly, the different contributions show that popularization existed under this dictatorial regime, and hence does not require a Habermasian liberal-democratic public sphere. Four more specific lessons are also drawn, each shedding new light on either science popularization or dictatorial regimes.

The princess at the conference: Science, pacifism, and Habsburg society.

Historians are showing increasing interest in scientific internationalism, the notion that science transcends national differences and hence advances peace and cooperation. This notion became particularly popular in the decades around 1900, the heyday of the universal expositions and the so-called first era of globalization. In this article I argue that in order to properly historicize scientific internationalism, it is imperative to understand how actors science to have pacifist effects, and to relate their technoscientific to their geopolitical imaginaries.

The History of Knowledge and the Future of Knowledge Societies.

The new field of the history of knowledge is often presented as a mere expansion of the history of science. We argue that it has a greater ambition. The re-definition of the historiographical domain of the history of knowledge urges us to ask new questions about the boundaries, hierarchies, and mutual constitution of different types of knowledge as well as the role and assessment of failure and ignorance in making knowledge.