History Day

Items

• All work and all play: unconventional sciences at the Warburg Library
  This blog post was written by Kella Lawrinson and Simone Monti, Graduate Library Trainees at the Warburg Institute as part of a series of posts on the theme of ‘Human Discovery: Experiencing Science’ for History Day 2022.
• Bees in the Collections
  The University of Reading houses one of the largest collections of bee-related material in the United Kingdom. The works contained within provide vital insights into historic social and political perceptions of the world’s most important pollinators. This online exhibition showcases some of the most significant apian-related works, held by the University and beyond, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century which demonstrate how social and cultural perceptions of bees and hives changed as British society evolved. The online exhibition curated by Olivia Blackburn, as part of a student project, ‘Bees in the Collections’, which was supervised by Professor Helen Parish and Dr Rohan Deb Roy from the Department of History, University of Reading.
• Book review: The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
  Archivist Kate Bond reviews a classic group biography of 18th-century scientists like William and Caroline Herschel, whose working papers are held in the RAS Archive
• Darwin's letters in Kew Gardens' Archives
  Our Senior Archivist takes a closer look at Charles Darwin's letters in our Archives. They were recently added to the UNESCO Memory of the World register.
• Joseph Lister in the Archives – “The Father of antiseptic surgery”
  Joseph Lister introduced the concept of antisepsis in surgery in the 1860s, paving the way for the modern aseptic techniques we recognise today. Read on for a brief history of his work, illustrated with items from the archive.
• Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants (1542) | Sachiko Kusukawa
  Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants, published in 1542, was a landmark in Renaissance book-printing. It contained more than five hundred large woodcuts of plants, accompanied by their morphological description and medicinal uses. Typical of its time, Fuchs’s study was based on a classical work on the medicinal uses of plants by Dioscorides (first century AD). Unusually for its time, Fuchs’s book contained an illustration of the artists that were involved in the production of the images. Fuchs had good reason to be proud of the artists, as they created for him the beautiful illustrations that functioned in multiple ways to aid the study of plants. I will introduce the ways in which illustrations mattered in Fuchs’s History of Plants before having a look at the copy now at the Linnean Society.
• The Evolution debate through the RCS England Library
  The Library holds various published materials that bear witness to the evolution debate of the second half of the 19th century. Some of the protagonists of this mental and moral battle were fellows, while the College constituted a focal point for scientific and intellectual circles.
• The history of the Wardian case in Kew Gardens' collections
  This video features our Assistant Archivist and our Economic Botany Collections Manager discussing the history of the Wardian case and its role in plant transportation.
• The Story of STEM at De Montfort University: 1884-Present
  In this online course we share here how a small technical college evolved to become thriving Faculties of Health and Life Sciences (HLS) and Computing, Engineering and Media (CEM).
• Unfolding Time: the Medieval Pocket Calendar
  Fewer than thirty concertina-fold almanacs are known to exist, this exhibition brings a group of them together for the first time and sets them alongside treasures from Lambeth Palace Library.
• View Everyday Technology Firsts (#TechFirsts) from the collections
  Share your memories, pictures and stories of how new technology has transformed people’s lives on this Padlet or on Twitter, using hashtag #TechFirsts.